Sustainability assessments

The Prime Minister’s Office is developing a holistic assessment model for sustainability-related considerations for the Government and all of society. The assessments will produce up-to-date information on the current state of sustainability challenges and identify some of the most significant sustainability-related risks and opportunities for Finland over the next 5–10 years.

The purpose of the assessments is to support the systematic anticipation and management of sustainability challenges and to provide a better picture of the current state, outlook and key interlinkages between different sustainability challenges across administrative boundaries in the short-to-medium term. The assessments do not aim to analyse the impacts of the current Government’s policies.

Instead of the traditional three dimensions of sustainability, the assessments examine the main challenges and outlook from five perspectives:

1. Ecological sustainability
2. Human and cultural sustainability
3. Social and health sustainability
4. Economic sustainability
5. Sustainability of security, the rule of law and democracy

How can the assessments help you?

The assessment model aims to help the Government with strategy processes and building a wider outlook on the current situation, with various reporting and prioritisation processes, and with supporting policy impact analyses and other sustainability considerations, for instance. A wide variety of experts from different ministries, research organisations and other sectors will be involved in the work. 

The goal is to publish an annual ‘The State of Finland – Towards Sustainable Prosperity’ report, the first of which will be released in late 2024 or early 2025. A discussion paper published in May 2024 describes the purpose, objectives and methodology of the assessment model in general and with a few examples. The publication includes an abstract in English.