Environmental conservation has undergone radical changes during the past 40 years, since the beginning of the Nessling Foundation. The original aim of the Foundation was to support scientific research that promotes environmental protection. This is not an easy task on the changing planet.
The environmental challenges we see today are not anymore only local problems but interlinked global challenges that affect seriously humanity. Climate change, unsustainable use of the natural resources, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services need solutions ASAP.
To promote the environmental protection, the Nessling Foundation has set the emphasis of the supported research in solution-oriented environmental research. To put solutions into action the research results need to be brought into the awareness of the public and the decision makers.
As politicians and other decision makers do not have access or time to find the closed scientific journals, our Foundation wants to encourage our researchers to communicate on their findings in the public.
To strengthen the communication of the researchers, the Foundation requires a communication plan as well as the identification of the users of the information in the grant application. We also promote the use of the scientific environmental information in the society by being an active member of the Forum for Environmental Information.
We recently organized together with Kone Foundation and Forum for Environmental Information an educational seminar on influencing, which was a concrete step towards empowering the researchers to communicate on their work in public. We launched a hashtag #tutkijavaikuta (translated as “research and make an impact”) in the seminar that blew up the Finnish Twitter.
The most important communicational opening of the Foundation itself is visible at the moment in front of you – new visually fresh and up to date web-pages, thanks for the producers in Kaskas Media. The idea of the new web page is not only to guide the grant applicants and the grant holders but also to provide topical information on environmental research and the state of our environment to the public.
We will spread the recurrent information of the web pages as well as the solutions for the environment by our researchers in our Facebook and Twitter accounts.
I promise to share every single environmental message that is sent to me by our researchers in the Nessling social media.
Let’s make environmental information visible together!
Minttu Jaakkola
minttu.jaakkola (at) nessling.fi
Twitter: @NesslinginSaatio
Writer works as a head of research in the Foundation and thinks that the most efficient communication is the face to face dialogue.
