Trump and Putin and the importance of paleo perspective

We report here two cases in which paleo research was deliberately used to inform policy, management, and industry practices. The first example deals with black carbon (BC) and the way in which our studies dealing with the longer-term perspective of BC in the Arctic was utilized by the President of Finland, Mr. Sauli Niinistö, in the 2018 Russia-United States summit in Helsinki, Finland. Prior to the summit, the Office of the President of the Republic of Finland contacted us in order to get the most recent updates about the BC trends in the Arctic. We had just published results from Arctic glaciers and lake sediment cores demonstrating that, in contrast to atmospheric measurements from a few Arctic stations showing that BC values have been decreasing during the recent years, at least in the Euro-Asian sector of the Arctic, the BC values have been increasing quite markedly since 1970. We further postulated that the increasing BC values are predominantly due to large-scale flaring activities. President Niinistö then raised the issue of BC in talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump emphasizing that "if we are able to cut down black carbon emissions - for instance from maritime transport, from old-fashioned power plants and from flaring in oil and gas fields - we will make a significant contribution to combating climate change in the Arctic".

The other example deals with the ecological damage inflicted by mine water originating from the massive Terrafame Talvivaara polymetal mine (central Finland), where bioheap leaching was applied to high-sulphur low-grade ore. Using paleolimnological techniques, we found that saline mine water had turned the nearby lakes meromictic, and that their sediments were heavily contaminated, pointing out to a large-scale regime shift in these ecosystems. We published our results in Scientific Reports with a wide media coverage. As a result, passionate debate arose in Finnish news media concerning the future of the mining site leading to citizen movement and big political pressure and ultimately to closure of the mining activities. According to our experiences, paleo science can have significant impact on political decision-making, yet there is an urgent need to raise the awareness of paleo scientists about the societal relevance and impact of their research field.