Finland’s new Arctic ambassador returns to a changed North

As Finland unveils its updated Arctic policy today, the country’s new envoy faces a very different region to the one he worked in four years ago. Ambassador Kalle Kankaanpää takes up his post at a time when political tensions, environmental pressures and commercial interest in the North are all accelerating at once.

“We have so many different puzzle pieces on the table,” Kankaanpää says. “Security, climate, Indigenous rights, commercial interests and people’s daily livelihoods – making the need for cooperation in the Arctic greater than ever.”

Finland redefines Arctic strategy

Prompted by the pace of change, and in the wake of joining NATO, Finland has today announced a new complementary Arctic foreign and security policy, that sets out how the country understands the shifting landscape in the North, and how it intends to operate in it. 

Finland’s role in the region has been evolving. Together with Sweden, it now helps strengthen NATO’s eastern and northern flanks, and where improved military mobility also help support civilian infrastructure, including roads, rail connections and cross-border routes with Sweden and Norway.

There is also a growing international appetite for Finland’s knowledge and expertise. In his role, Kankaanpää meets non-Arctic states, who increasingly want to understand the technologies, services and policy approaches that Finland has developed for harsh northern conditions. Icebreaker cooperation with the US and Canada is one example, along with Finland’s expertise in space surveillance, meteorological equipment and defense products like armored vehicles and weaponry built for Arctic cold.

“Finnish expertise is in high demand,” he notes. “Everything we test in Lapland’s winter works anywhere in the Arctic.”

The Arctic he left behind

When Kankaanpää left for a bilateral posting in Zagreb four years ago, the Arctic looked very different. The region still operated under a kind of Arctic exceptionalism. The Arctic Council met regularly, with cooperation among the eight Arctic states as the guiding principle.

Kankaanpää remembers that period well. Before Zagreb, he headed Finland’s Northern Europe unit, with the Arctic team in his portfolio, and oversaw a system that still functioned as it was designed. “At that time there was also an attempt to keep security policy matters out of the Arctic agenda,” he recalls.

Then everything changed with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia makes up over half of the Arctic coastline. “But as long as it continues to wage its cruel full-scale war against Ukraine, cooperation cannot function as before,” Kankaanpää says.

Good work still being done

Despite the political freeze, the machinery of Arctic cooperation hasn’t stopped. “There is a lot of valuable work still going on within the framework,” Kankaanpää notes. The six Arctic Council working groups and their expert networks continue to operate, producing scientific and environmental research that feeds into global processes, notably the IPCC. Kankaanpää points out that many of these projects include scientists from non-Arctic observer states, and their representatives who were active at COP 30 in Belem, Brazil this year as well.

“You might say climate change is the real elephant in the room,” he says. “It affects almost everything in the North – new shipping lanes, military mobility to mining, fishing, tourism and geopolitical attention.”

He points to scientific warnings about potential disruption to Atlantic ocean currents, which have been highlighted by climate researcher Stefan Rahmstorf and others. In worst-case scenarios this could shift Nordic climates closer to the tundra of northern Canada. To understand what is truly changing, Kankaanpää argues strongly that scientific data must be paired with Indigenous knowledge from people who have “been living with the nature there for centuries” and have experienced shifts in seasons, weather and ecosystems across generations.

Roots in the region

Kankaanpää’s interest in the region goes beyond diplomacy, it’s personal. He grew up in Rovaniemi, the land of Santa Claus, where a meter of snow and three weeks of minus 30°C just meant winter. He did his military training in Sodankylä in the far north of Finland and served across the Arctic region in his early diplomatic career; so he understands the reality of people who deal with snow, ice and long distances every day. The Arctic is, at its core, a place where millions of people live. “It’s our home,” Kankaanpää says. “It’s a place where people live, work, and raise children. It’s not just some distant playground for geopolitical games and power struggles.”

Staying open to hope

But he wants to stay hopeful. He sees glimmers on two fronts. On climate: emissions are starting to decline in China, and at U.S. state level, there is growing momentum in renewables — signs that “change has started, even if we should do more.” On governance, Kankaanpää believes one day the Arctic states will again be sitting together around the same table. For that reason, he argues that structures like the Arctic Council and all the working groups and knowledge systems within it, must be protected now, “because they cannot easily be rebuilt.”

The boy from Rovaniemi, who once skied his way through sub-zero winters without thinking it was special, is now tasked with persuading the world that his ordinary Arctic home should be everyone’s concern.

“There’s no easy solution, but the future of the Arctic depends on one thing,” Kankaanpää concludes, “And that’s finding ways to work together again.”