Governmental Measures to Enhance the Finnish Innovation System to Respond to the Challenge of Mitigating Climate Change

Climate innovations, that cover both technological applications and process and service innovations, play a key role in climate change mitigation. The purpose of this study was to examine how the Finnish innovation system could be enhanced with governmental measures so that the diffusion of climate innovations could be speeded up. During the study, it became evident that the governmental measures need to support the whole innovation chain, which comprises of research, development, demonstration and deployment. Only this can lead to the successful birth and diffusion of low carbon innovations. The study found that the strengths of the Finnish innovation system are research and development, and the current national innovation policies strongly support these activities. However, these have been emphasised at the expense of the demonstration and deployment. Consequently, the biggest bottlenecks in the Finnish innovation landscape are the lack of pilot and demonstration projects and slow commercialisation, thus the high price of the innovation. To meet with the challenge, the government should firstly promote strict greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. This would boost up the innovation activities, which would also lower the prices of the innovations. To speed up the commercialisation process, measures that stimulate the domestic market, such as feed-in-tariffs and public procurements, are needed. Special attention should also be paid to the measures that could shift the traditional closed innovation chain towards open innovation. This means that the product development should involve experts from several fields such as the user and marketing experts to speed up the commercialisation. In addition, efficient innovation co-operation between both private and public sector is essential. Finally, as the domestic resources are not adequate for producing all the innovations needed, the domestic innovation activities should be focused on a few sectors, and at the same time promote efficient import policies.

Wind turbine operation in cold climate

The goal of the master‘s thesis is to determine and estimate ice accretion influence on the wind turbine blade performance. The thesis describes the technique of ice accretion calculation on the wind turbine blade and determination characteristics of the turbine with ice accreted. The methodology of the classic Blade Element Moment Theory was used. Iced blade experimental data was investigated in order to calculate blade with ice characteristics. The obtained results shows that iced blade power coefficient is lower than clean blade one. The heating system implementation shows that in the particular site in the Lapland region it is efficient.

Climate driven changes in temperature, pH and food quality : effects on copepod reproduction

Increased emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are causing an anthropogenic climate change. The resulting global warming challenges the ability of organisms to adapt to the new temperature conditions. However, warming is not the only major threat. In marine environments, dissolution of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere causes a decrease in surface water pH, the so called ocean acidification. The temperature and acidification effects can interact, and create even larger problems for the marine flora and fauna than either of the effects would cause alone. I have used Baltic calanoid copepods (crustacean zooplankton) as my research object and studied their growth and stress responses using climate predictions projected for the next century. I have studied both direct temperature and pH effects on copepods, and indirect effects via their food: the changing phytoplankton spring bloom composition and toxic cyanobacterium. The main aims of my thesis were: 1) to find out how warming and acidification combined with a toxic cyanobacterium affect copepod reproductive success (egg production, egg viability, egg hatching success, offspring development) and oxidative balance (antioxidant capacity, oxidative damage), and 2) to reveal the possible food quality effects of spring phytoplankton bloom composition dominated by diatoms or dinoflagellates on reproducing copepods (egg production, egg hatching, RNA:DNA ratio). The two copepod genera used, Acartia sp. and Eurytemora affinis are the dominating mesozooplankton taxa (0.2 – 2 mm) in my study area the Gulf of Finland. The 20°C temperature seems to be within the tolerance limits of Acartia spp., because copepods can adapt to the temperature phenotypically by adjusting their body size. Copepods are also able to tolerate a pH decrease of 0.4 from present values, but the combination of warm water and decreased pH causes problems for them. In my studies, the copepod oxidative balance was negatively influenced by the interaction of these two environmental factors, and egg and nauplii production were lower at 20°C and lower pH, than at 20°C and ambient pH. However, presence of toxic cyanobacterium Nodularia spumigena improved the copepod oxidative balance and helped to resist the environmental stress, in question. In addition, adaptive maternal effects seem to be an important adaptation mechanism in a changing environment, but it depends on the condition of the female copepod and her diet how much she can invest in her offspring. I did not find systematic food quality difference between diatoms and dinoflagellates. There are both good and bad diatom and dinoflagellate species. Instead, the dominating species in the phytoplankton bloom composition has a central role in determining the food quality, although copepods aim at obtaining as a balanced diet as possible by foraging on several species. If the dominating species is of poor quality it can cause stress when ingested, or lead to non-optimal foraging if rejected. My thesis demonstrates that climate change induced water temperature and pH changes can cause problems to Baltic Sea copepod communities. However, their resilience depends substantially on their diet, and therefore the response of phytoplankton to the environmental changes. As copepods are an important link in pelagic food webs, their future success can have far reaching consequences, for example on fish stocks.

A new climatic periodisation of the Gold and Guinea Coasts in West Africa, 1750-1798 : a reconstruction of the climate during the slave trade era, including an analysis of the climatically facilitated Trans-Atlantic slave trade

Avsikten med studien är att producera den första rekonstruktionen av det västafrikanska klimatet mellan 1750 och 1798. Kunskapen om det västafrikanska klimatet före 1800-talet är till dags dato bristfällig, vilket gör det svårare att förstå framtida klimatvariationer. Det är bristen på instrumentell meteorologisk data (temperatur, regnmängd, och lufttryck), vilket i princip bara täcker det senaste århundradet, som är orsaken till att tidigare klimat är bristfälligt kartlagda. Klimatet och miljön är även sådana att proxydata från ’naturens arkiv’ (såsom t.ex. trädringar) har begränsad användning. Således är historiska dokument, främst från gästande kulturer/nationer/intressenter, innehållande deskriptiv information om vädret och klimatet, klimatforskarens viktigaste källa. Genom att använda tidigare, för det här syftet, oanvända källor påvisade den här undersökningen att klimatet i västra Afrika och Guldkusten (Ghana) har ändrats sedan 1700-talet. Monsunregnen var svagare och kortvarigare, speciellt den sekundära regnperioden under hösten var betydligt svagare än idag. Det förekom kraftiga årliga variationer i monsunregnen, men sett ur längre tidsperspektiv utmärktes torrare och blötare perioder. Studien kunde också visa en viss korrelation mellan det globala väderfenomenet El Niño och regnperiodens intensitet längs med kusten. Flera torrperioder sammanföll med tidigare registrerade El Niño sekvenser. Speciellt slutet av 1760-talet påverkades kraftigt av El Niño och även det globala klimatet verkar ha genomgått graftiga förändringar just dessa år. På basis av den nya klimatrekonstruktionen genomfördes också en jämförelse av klimatets inverkan på den transatlantiska slavhandeln från 1750 till 1798, en fråga som historikerna gjort anspelningar på i över 30 år. Utförseln av slavar från västra Afrika var som kraftigast under 1700-talets andra hälft. Analysen visade att slavhandeln delvis tilltog i samband med klimatanomalierna.

Case study in responsive (re)design

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Mirage 2: A responsive user interface for DSpace

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Bumblebees in a Changing Climate: Evaluating the Effects of Temperature on Queen Performance

Bumblebees are a very essential group of pollinating insects, but their populations have declined drastically during the past decades. We need to understand why their numbers are decreasing and what can be done to reverse this trend. Climate change-related phenomena, such as changes in the overwintering temperatures and spring conditions, are among the most prominent threats to bumblebees. Queens have a special role in the lifecycle of bumblebees because they overwinter and start new colonies the next year. Their successful performance: survival, overwintering ability, longevity, immune competence, and nest establishing capability in spring, is highly important for bumblebee populations. However, the effects of climate change on bumblebee queen performance remain unknown. The main objective of this thesis was to assess how temperature affects the performance of bumblebee queens during and after overwintering. The effects of warm temperature predicted by climate change scenarios on queen survival and stress-tolerance were studied by a four-month artificial diapause of bumblebee queens at two temperatures (9°C and 1.8°C). Bumblebee colonies were also reared in a laboratory and factors affecting colony characteristics were examined. In addition, queen performance during spring was studied in a starvation experiment using two temperatures (15°C as normal; 24°C as warmer than average) and queens collected from nature right after their emergence. My research revealed how temperature affects queen performance, and queen size was found to be an important factor determining the direction of some of these effects. We found a 0.4g weight threshold for bumblebee queens to be able to survive overwintering. In addition, during mild winters, larger queens have a higher chance than smaller ones to survive through winter and also to cope with immunological stresses after overwintering. During cold conditions, which are normal in the current climatic situation, this advantage disappears. In the spring starvation experiment, the starved queens survived approximately eight days longer in 15°C than in 24°C, which means that starvation risk rises significantly with increasing spring temperature, in a situation where food is scarce due to for example frost damage or asynchrony between bumblebees and their important food plants. These results could mean that in the future climate, larger queens are better able to survive the winter, initiate their nests and start rearing their offspring. This may be problematic, because I also detected two alternative strategies of colony development that differ between large and small queens; larger queens start to lay eggs earlier at nest initiation, their colonies mature later, they produce more workers, and they have a more strongly male biased sex allocation compared with smaller queens. If larger queens have a greater change of producing offspring after a mild winter, this could lead to a significant decline in the total production of new queens at a population level. Thus, it seems that queen size could act as one mechanism regulating the population level outcomes in different temperatures. The new information presented in my thesis reinforces that basic research, monitoring, and local species conservation of bumblebees both in Finland and globally must be increased to ensure that this highly important pollinator group survives in the face of climate change.