Jan KunnasUniversity of Oulu
Jan Kunnas
Doctor in History & Civilization
About
58
Publications
8,392
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361
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I am a docent in ecological economic history, examining how history can provide guidance towards future, how human activities have created pollution, but we have also solved earlier environmental problems like acid rain or the “ozone hole”, how we have caused extinction of species but also created valuable landscapes. Its ultimate goal is to use historical research to provide a roadmap for the ongoing sustainability revolution and adaptation to climate change.
Additional affiliations
January 2014 - December 2014
Position
- PostDoc Position
Description
- Post doc researcher in the project Finnish crop failures and famines in an international context. My main task is to make quantitative calculations of food prouduction and consumption in Finland before and during the famines in the mid 1860s.
January 2012 - December 2014
Position
- PostDoc Position
Description
- Post doc research assistant in a project combining insights from economics, economic history and environmental history to conduct long-run tests of the predictive power of Genuine Savings as an indicator of sustainable development.
October 2005 - June 2009
Education
January 2005 - June 2009
Publications
Publications (58)
This article examines how to account for the welfare effects of carbon dioxide emissions, using the historical experiences of Britain and the USA from the onset of the industrial revolution to the present. While a single country might isolate itself from the detrimental effects of global warming in the short run, in the long all countries are unabl...
Genuine Savings (GS) has been much used in recent years as an indicator of a country's sustainability. According to some theorists (e.g. Arrow et al, 2012), under certain conditions a country with a positive level of GS should experience non-declining future utility, given the assumption of unlimited substitutability among all forms of capital (som...
This article examines the growth and composition of energy consumption in Finland in the ninteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. It argues that Finland was the “odd-man out” among European countries, because it industrialized by means of renewable, indigenous energy sources. Not until a mature phase o...
In this paper, I bring forth a proposal on how to proceed with the Climate Negotiations after the meager results of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2009 in Copenhagen. I argue that splitting continued negotiations into two separate blocks could both save time and make it more likely to ultimately reach a comprehensive treat...
This article examines the linkage between per capita GDP and sulphur dioxide emissions for one single country, in this case Finland. The narrow approach together with a combination of a historical and economical approach enables us to cut deeper into the controversial environmental Kuznets curve-hypothesis. We found the main reasons for a downturn...
An education for sustainable development is a 30-year old effort that has been challenging schools and universities to prepare students in society to resolve the multiple crises created by human activities. Its intrinsic complexity demands collaborations across disciplines and urges contributions from Indigenous knowledge, while recognizing the lim...
We still do not know, where the Planetary boundary for novel entities lies, but we have probably crossed it!
Persson et al. argue that we are outside the safe operating space of the planetary boundary for novel entities, since the annual production and releases of chemicals including plastics are increasing at a pace that outstrips the global capa...
Yhteisellä planeetalla Suomen maakunnatkaan eivät ole suojassa globaalien ympäristökriisien, kuten ilmastonmuutoksen ja luontokadon, kielteisiltä suorilta ja
välillisiltä vaikutuksilta. Alueilla tapahtuva ihmistoiminta myötävaikuttaa näiden kriisien voimistumiseen. Ympäristökriisit haastavat yhteiskunnallista kehitystä kokonaan uudella tavalla jo...
The proposal to recognize the Anthropocene as a continuing geological
event could resolve some of the bitter quarrels the concept evokes
Tämä taustaraportti on osa Jyväskylän yliopiston resurssiviisausyhteisön Aluekehittämisen kestävyyden kivijalka -selvityshanketta, jossa etsitään vaikuttavampia arviointimenetelmiä aluekehittämisen kestävyyden edistämiseksi. Tässä taustaraportissa tarkastelemme aluekehittämisen kestävyyttä suhteessa Planetaarisiin rajoihin ja YK:n Kestävän kehityks...
I argue that one of the most urgent tasks of geoethics is how to deal with climate change in a just and equitable way. At worst, our current path could lead to multi-metre sea-level rise, increases in storms and climate extremes, causing devastating social disruption and economic consequences. I present some alternatives on how to handle this alarm...
Located solely in the northern hemisphere, boreal forests contain an estimated one-third of Earth’s forested land. The purpose of this work aimed at reviewing the evolution of approaches in land planning and management of boreal forests in Finland and Northern Sweden, while comparing these to those developed in Minnesota. The nature of this work is...
While geologists are still considering whether the Anthropocene should be accepted as a formal geological epoch, it is up to us humanists to search for ways making this human era a good one. In this article, I will examine how we can use historical research to provide such tracks based on past regularities or similarities. Positive success stories...
Strawberries are big business in California, which produces 88 percent of strawberries in the United States. Julie Guthman's well researched book, Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry, which is based on the interviews of 75 growers, 50 workers, and dozens of industry representatives, presents a dark side o...
Borsari B., Kunnas J. (2019) Agriculture Production and Consumption. In: Leal Filho W., Azul A., Brandli L., Özuyar P., Wall T. (eds) Responsible Consumption and Production. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham
This article looks for guidelines on how regions depending on natural resources could meet future challenges. We do this by seeking past regularities through a survey of the long-run development of the use and discussion of timber and other forest-related natural resources in Finland, from slash-and-burn cultivation in the eighteenth century to pre...
The Arctic has often been seen as a natural area, or even a "wilderness", where mainly indigenous and subsistence activities have been prominent. Contrary to this, the present volume highlights the very long historical development of resource use systems in northern Europe, across multiple actors and multiple levels, and including varying populatio...
This chapter is a contribution to the Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SD 12).
Cite this entry as:
Borsari B., Kunnas J. (2019) Agriculture Production and Consumption. In: Leal Filho W., Azul A., Brandli L., Özuyar P., Wall T. (eds) Responsible Consumption and Production. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. S...
This chapter takes its point of departure in the historical importance of forestry in Sweden, which also has repercussions for how other land uses are defi ned and what rights they are given. The main focus is on the historical development through which forestry and the role of wood production have been institutionalized as the primary land use, gra...
Kansantaloudellinen aikakauskirja
Artikkelissa esitetyt laskelmat osoittavat, että vuosina 1867–1868 Suomessa vallitsi absoluuttinen ruokapula, vaikka tasaisesti jaettuna ruokaa olisi pelkkää henkiinjäämistä ajatellen ollut tarpeeksi koko väestölle, tosin työkyvyn kustannuksella. Elintarvikkeiden nettotuonnin olisi vuonna 1867 pitänyt olla kolminke...
As stated on the back cover, the purpose of the edited book Peripheral Flows
and its eleven articles “is to reconsider and re-assess the role of cores and
peripheries in shaping modern socio-technical systems.” This stated purpose
is achieved to a variable degree, as eleven interesting articles are crammed
into only 275 pages leaving less than 23 p...
This paper examines whether the Anthropocene can be a helpful metaphor for holistic understandings of human impacts on the Earth. I argue that for this, splitting the Anthropocene into several consecutive stages would be helpful, and suggest a multistage Anthropocene: the early Anthropocene, the first acceleration phase, the post-1950 Great Acceler...
Human capital can be defined as the knowledge, skills, competencies and attributes embodied in individuals that facilitate the creation of personal, social and economic well-being. It is arguably one of the most important determinants of economic growth. In general, human capital has been calculated with two different approaches: (1) retrospective...
This chapter is a call for greater reciprocity in interdisciplinary research. I show how a larger mutuality between economics and economic history could benefit both disciplines, something understood already by Ibn Khaldun (1332—1406), who was both a historian and an economist. I hope though to ignite a discussion for lanes in both directions in al...
Estimates of Britain’s comprehensive wealth are reported for the period 1760–2000. They include measures of produced, natural,
and human capital, and illustrate the changing composition of Britain’s assets over this time period. We show how genuine
savings, GS (a year-on-year measure of the change in total capital and a claimed indicator of sustain...
This paper develops further a proposal to split continued climate negotiations into two separate blocks. The first block deals with historical emissions of greenhouse gases, including a mutual debt cancellation: the accumulated carbon debts of developed countries up to a cut-off year would be swapped for conventional monetary debts of developing co...
Technology transfer can be defined as a broad set of processes covering the flows of know-how, experience and equipment from one place, group or person to another. It is usually described as something going from developed countries to developing countries or from the interior to the periphery or from “advanced” to “backward” areas. This article tak...
Suomen metsien järkevimmästä käytöstä kiisteltiin jo 1700-luvulla, tuolloin erityisenä keskustelun kohteena oli kaskiviljelyn vahingollisuus. Henric Hassel arvosteli vuonna 1751 kaskiviljely metsien hävittämisestä, koska kaskeamisen jälkeen kasvoi lähinnä lehtimetsää, mutta ei koskaan niin järeätä kuusta tai mäntyä kuin ennen. Toisena, ja todennäkö...
Environmental history is often described as an offspring of the environmental movement in the Western countries in the 1960s and 1970s. Alfred W. Crosby, however, lists several beginnings of environmental history in America from the 1920s and onwards “before it was finally well launched”. Finding a unique point of creation would also require an una...
This article test, whether John Rawls ́ Theory of Justice is still relevant in a warming climate. The starting point is Finland, which is assumed as a useful example, as many social indicators suggest that Finland is close to Rawlsian egalitarian standards of distributive justice. The theory is brought to the globalized world of 21st century, by wi...
This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.
This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.
This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.
Quantitative calculations on the use of natural resources provide valuable tools, which can give new insights to old questions and rise new ones. In this article, I compare the wood consumption in the production of potash, saltpeter and pine wood tar in 19th century Finland. My calculations shows that in the 19th century the cumulative wood consump...
The article tests a hypothesis claiming that the gaseous emissions of energy production follow an inverted U-curve related to income. The hypothesis is known as the ‘environmental Kuznets curve’ (EKC). The tested data contain Finnish emissions in the period 1800–2003 using newly constructed emission series. Although the carbon dioxide emissions fro...
In historical research about fire-clearance husbandry in Finland the focus has been on burning of forests, while swamps and other peatlands have been neglected. I claim that this neglect is not acceptable. According to my calculations, the amount of biomass measured by energy value burned on peatlands surpassed the amount burned in slash-and-burn c...
We claim that slash-and-burn agriculture can, under certain circumstances, be considered sustainable, although ecological sustainability is very difficult to prove, and questions concerning social and economic sustainability also must be taken into account. History, however, shows that slash-and-burn cultivation has for centuries provided a basis f...
Endast avhandlingens sammandrag. Pappersexemplaret av hela avhandlingen finns för läsesalsbruk i Statsvetenskapliga biblioteket (Unionsgatan 35). Dessa avhandlingar fjärrutlånas endast som microfiche. Abstract only. The paper copy of the whole thesis is available for reading room use at the Library of Social Sciences (Unioninkatu 35) . Microfiche c...
Questions
Questions (18)
We have now over 350 000 chemicals and mixtures of chemicals registered for production and use, and more are developed constantly. How can we speed up their assessment for safety, to erase the backlog of unexamined ones?
It is said that desperate times require desperate measures. My assumption is that this also causes short-sightedness in the decisions. I am looking for studies that would support or dismiss this assumption. Furthermore, if it holds, are there ways to counteract short-sightedness?
Can ecological sustainability increase the attractiveness of a region, especially regarding the moving decisions of skilled migrants?
Any suggestions on articles or books showing how history can provide in bioregional terms a "sense of place" and thus connect us to our surroundings and help to solve current environmental problems? #bioregionalism
"According to conventional wisdom John Tyndall was the first to measure the variation in absorption of radiant energy by atmospheric gases and the first to predict the impact on climate of small changes in atmospheric gas composition. Overlooked by modern researchers is the work of Eunice Foote, who, three years prior to the start of Tyndall's laboratory research, conducted similar experiments on absorption of radiant energy by atmospheric gases, such as CO2 and water vapor. The presentation of her report at a major scientific convention in 1856 was accompanied by speculation that even modest increases in the concentration of CO2 could result in significant atmospheric warming."
R. P. Sorenson, “Eunice Foote's Pioneering Research On CO2 And Climate Warming,” Search and Discovery Article #70092 (2011)
I am looking for research on what makes a region attractive. I am assuming that what makes a region attractive for potential movers makes them also attractive for companies needing a good workforce. Are those characters the same for those already living in the region (keeping power) and those that we want to attract to move to the region? What about tourists?
