Tero Mustonen is an environmental hero and has just won a Goldman Prize - also known as a 'Green Nobel'.
About a century ago, nearly a third of Finland was covered in peatlands, which are wetland ecosystems that are one of the planet’s largest and most important carbon sinks. Despite occupying a mere three percent of the Earth's surface, they are estimated to contain twice as much carbon as the world's entire forests combined.
Aptly, the Finnish word for Finland is “Suomi” - “suo” means “mire” or “swamp.” However, many of these pristine areas of peatland were strip-mined for fuel or drained.
On a mission to restore these critical ecosystems, Tero Mustonen started in his own backyard and worked to restore a peat mine in his village that was polluting nearby waterways and killing fish. Since that first project, he’s now working on restoring and rewilding around 130,000 acres across 80 sites across Finland. It's a truly great story of ecological restoration and demonstrates what the will and determination of just one person can achieve.
Mustonen’s organization, the Snowchange Cooperative, also partners with Sámi Indigenous and Finnish rural communities on an “approach that supports traditional knowledge and Sámi rights.” And his organization has now ventured beyond Finland.
Recently, Mustonen, 46, won a Goldman Environmental Prize for his work through his NGO, which has now taken on a global agenda for ecological and native cultural restoration from Alaska, Canada and northern Russian to Polynesia and New Zealand.
In an interview with Yale Environment he said: "When our rewilding program started, many big corporations offered us huge amounts of money if we certified carbon credits. We consulted with communities. But our answer was that we don’t sell nature. We know that peatlands are extremely effective in storing carbon. We monitor this in detail. But we don’t think it is right to go to a degraded site, restore it, and then claim economic benefit for doing so. We accept donor support for the actual restoration work; but that’s it."
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