Finland's Land Now Emits More Carbon Than It Absorbs

The part of the carbon account that can change sign

Every other emissions measure counts what an economy releases. This one counts what its land does — forests, cropland, grassland, wetlands and soils — and unlike the rest it can be negative, because growing vegetation removes carbon from the atmosphere.

In 2024 EU land removed a net 0.5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per inhabitant. The Union's land is a carbon sink, and that sink is counted against its emissions in the net figures used for its climate targets.

Behind that half tonne, Member States sit on both sides of zero.

Finland

Finland records positive 1.7 tonnes per inhabitant. Its land sector emits more carbon than it absorbs.

For a country that is roughly three quarters forest, this is a striking result and a comparatively recent one. It is also not, mainly, a story about forests.

Broken into the land categories the same inventories report, Finnish forest land still removed carbon in 2024 — but only 0.1 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, against 30.3 million in 2015. The forest sink is 0.4% of what it was nine years earlier, which is a collapse rather than a decline, and it is very nearly at zero.

What pushes the whole sector above zero is farmland. Finnish cropland emitted 8.4 million tonnes in 2024, most of the 9.8 million the sector emitted in total, with wetlands and settlements adding most of the rest and harvested wood products removing 2.1 million against them.

The two halves have different causes. The forest sink collapsed as harvesting rose and growth slowed in ageing stands; the cropland emissions come from drained organic soils, which release carbon continuously regardless of what is growing above them.

Latvia at 1.5 and Estonia at 1.4 are in the same position, and for broadly similar reasons. Germany at 0.7, Ireland at 0.5, Austria at 0.4, the Netherlands at 0.2 and Portugal at 0.1 complete the eight Member States above zero — for Ireland and the Netherlands, drained peat and intensively managed grassland rather than forestry.

Sweden

Sweden removes 5.1 tonnes per inhabitant, the largest sink in the Union by a wide margin. Lithuania follows at 2.7 and Slovenia at 2.1.

Sweden and Finland are the comparison that makes the point. They are neighbours with comparable forest cover and comparable forest industries, and they sit at opposite ends of this ranking — 5.1 tonnes of removal against 1.7 tonnes of emission, a difference of 6.8 tonnes per person.

The category breakdown puts that contrast in one figure. Swedish forest land alone removed 54.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2024, more than the country's entire land sector nets, because Swedish cropland emits against it. Finnish forest land removed 0.1 million.

The difference is not climate. It is the balance between how fast the forest grows and how much is cut, together with the extent of drained organic soils. Those are management variables, and they can move within a decade in either direction.

Why this matters more than its size suggests

Half a tonne per person sounds small beside total EU emissions of several tonnes per person. Its importance is that it is the only term in the account that can be increased directly rather than by reducing something else, and the Union's climate framework relies on it growing.

A sink that is shrinking, or flipping sign in the Member States with the most forest, removes that assumption. Finland's position is therefore a problem for the Union's arithmetic and not only for Finland's.

Reading the sign

The convention here is that positive means net emission and negative means net removal, which is the opposite of how a sink is usually described in words. A country doing well on this indicator has a large negative number.