people

Lasse Miettinen

Director, Sustainability solutions

Who?

Lasse Miettinen is the director of Sustainability solutions at Sitra. Overseeing the work of three teams and circa forty experts, his core task is to facilitate the transition in which individuals, companies and societies fit their activities within nature’s limits – and flourish while doing so.

What?

A just and sustainable future is Lasse’s passion, and the goal he’s been working for in different roles throughout his career. To him, innovating solutions for living a good life, creating competitive business, and ensuring a vibrant economy, all within the limits of nature’s carrying capacity, is one of the most exciting challenges imaginable.

Before his current position, Lasse’s job at Sitra focused on mainstreaming biodiversity into the heart of both public and private sector’s decision-making. He is especially thrilled by private and public sector initiatives establishing natural capital as the foundation of our economy, the role of market mechanisms in combatting nature loss, and the development of biodiversity metrics.

Before joining Sitra, Lasse spent 15 years in the labyrinths of political decision-making, in positions such as special adviser to ministers, and secretary general of the Finnish Green Party. From municipalities to the Finnish government, from Brussels corridors to international treaty negotiations, he’s experienced the pain and joy of nudging systemic change forward, bit by bit.

What else?

An historian by training, Lasse is nevertheless extremely enthusiastic about science and technology. He loves books, cooking, and the windy seas of the Turku archipelago, on the southwestern Finnish coast. And more than anything, his two children.

Since he was a kid devouring children’s space books, Lasse’s been waiting for humanity’s first outpost on Mars, predicted then to take place before the turn of the millennium. Though the wait has been long, Lasse firmly expects to see that happen before reaching retirement age.