Estonian Business School

 Last month, leading market research, data analytics, and business consulting company Emor released findings that surprised nobody who has spent any time paying attention. Estonian consumers, the pollster found, are growing less interested in green topics year by year. The share of people describing a company’s environmental mindset as “rather not important” is climbing, and the supporters of slowing down the green transition now outnumber those who want to keep pace or accelerate.  

The same month, the World Meteorological Organisation published its State of the Global Climate report for 2025. It confirmed that the past eleven years (2015-2025) are the hottest on record and found that Earth’s energy imbalance – the gap between heat entering the atmosphere and heat escaping it – has reached its highest level in 65 years of measurement. 

These two things are true simultaneously. Consumer fatigue is real, and so is the climate emergency! And these are realities Aleksandra Kekkonen understands deeply. As Associate Professor of Circular Economy and Head of the Green, Circular Economy and Resources Knowledge Team at Estonian Business School (EBS), she has spent years watching the gap between public mood and scientific reality widen. “People don’t like to talk about these topics because it brings them depression and difficult feelings,” she says. “But even though we don’t want to hear anymore, even though we are tired, the reality remains that the situation is worsening and people still need to keep that in mind.” 

The survey that changed things 

“Starting 2019, when the Circular Economy Action Plan was adopted, and when the EU Green Deal legislation started to be implemented… It was a huge legislative support for sustainability and related matters,” Aleksandra points out. “Companies started to realise they need to consider those perspectives in their business activities and their business modelling.” 

But realising and knowing are different things. In 2022, EBS was commissioned by the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to find out exactly how much Estonian companies actually understood about the green transition. The findings were stark. Across a sample of 500 companies from industries ranging from manufacturing to services, most had almost no real grasp of what green transition meant in practice. While awareness of buzzwords like circular economy, green economy, and ESG was high, understanding of what any of those concepts truly meant and required operationally was not. 

“Only bigger companies, for example, those working in energy or construction, who face strict regulatory requirements, only those were thinking from an environmental perspective,” Aleksandra notes. “Other companies had no strategy at all.” 

The finding created a window. If companies lacked the knowledge, EBS, as a business school with exactly that expertise, could supply it. The result was the creation of a set of micro-degrees and a master ’s-level specialisation in green economy innovation, all designed to translate the complexity of the green transition into something business leaders could actually act on. It was a direct institutional response to a demonstrated gap, far beyond an abstract commitment to sustainability as a value. 

That pragmatic logic runs through everything the EBS Green, Circular Economy and Resources Knowledge Team do. A group of researchers deeply embedded in the field of sustainability, they are studying it from both internal and external perspectives, actively running funded projects, developing practical tools, and collaborating with diverse stakeholders across multiple countries. Their work brings crucial visibility to the inherent problems within this domain, as they strive to identify and implement comprehensive solutions. 

What happens when a food system breaks? 

One of the many research projects housed at EBS, and to be more specific in this case, the Green, Circular Economy and Resources Knowledge Team, is RegioFoodS (From Regional Relevance to Transnational Value: How Regional Food Systems Can Boost Resilience and Self-sufficiency in Nordic and Baltic countries). RegioFoodS is a three-year project funded by the Estonian Research Council and the European Commission, and it asks a question that sounds almost too simple: Can the Nordic and Baltic countries feed themselves more reliably by working together? 

Capital regions like Tallinn’s Harju County produce almost no food, but they consume enormous quantities of it. That consumption is met by supply chains that stretch far beyond Estonia’s borders – chains that, as recent years have demonstrated repeatedly, are more fragile than they appear. The Nordic Council of Ministers for Fisheries, Aquaculture, Food and Forestry formally acknowledged this in the 2024 Karlstad Declaration, stating that “experiences of recent years with extreme weather, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine demonstrate the importance of strengthened cross-border co-operation in the Nordic Region to prevent and manage crises.” 

What the Karlstad Declaration recognised politically, RegioFoodS is trying to make operational. The project maps food system vulnerabilities across the participating countries, identifying which parts of each supply chain are most exposed, which regions are most dependent on imports, and where the bottlenecks form when pressure arrives. “Our aim is to understand how things are, and to build scenarios based on scientific papers and forecasts for each of the countries participating,” Aleksandra Kekkonen highlights. 

However, mapping fragility is only the first step. The deeper ambition is an observatory – a shared structure where food system stakeholders from across the region can meet, share data, exchange best practices, and work collectively through problems as they arise. It will function as a support mechanism for the kind of cross-border intelligence that prevents local shocks from becoming regional crises. 

EBS’s specific contribution sits at the business model layer, helping to understand how food producers in Estonia and the region could shift toward more circular, more locally anchored models without sacrificing viability. “Our strongest perspective,” Aleksandra says, “is that we can help develop business models for different sectors and take into consideration research results to understand the company pains.” 

The forests, and the people who work in them 

European forests are under extraordinary pressure. Drought, bark beetle infestations, wildfire, and the compounding effects of decades of intensifying management have left them more vulnerable than their apparent health suggests. And the people who work in these forests are dealing with stresses their training never prepared them for, from new legislation, new digital tools, new carbon market mechanisms, to new requirements for sustainability planning. The knowledge exists somewhere, usually in academic literature or regulatory documents, but it has not been translated into the language of the people who actually need it. This is where CO-FOREST comes in.  

Just like RegioFoodS, CO-FOREST (Creating Opportunities for Resilience, Entrepreneurship, Sustainability and Training in European Forestry) is another research project Aleksandra, and the Green, Circular Economy and Resources Knowledge Team are working on. The project, running from 2026 to 2028 and funded by the European Commission, brings together higher education institutions (HEIs), vocational education and training (VET) providers, stakeholder associations, forestry enterprises, policymakers, and local communities from six European countries. 

CO-FOREST is a forest-focused education and entrepreneurship project developing “challenge-driven and place-based training programmes that integrate digital tools and sustainable entrepreneurship” built around specific needs. Aleksandra notes that the work is to identify what forest stakeholders – whether large management companies, smaller private owners, community-based organisations or even students – actually need to know and then build training modules around those specific gaps. 

“People are missing understanding of the legislative requirements, and these need to be translated into simpler language,” Aleksandra points out. “The same applies to different technologies that could be used, from satellite mapping, CO2 measurement tools, to digital instruments for forest management.” The training, in other words, is not generic sustainability content dropped into a new sector but rather built from the needs up. 

Designing for the end from the beginning 

Asked what she wishes more people understood about her field, Aleksandra Kekkonen answers without hesitation, “circular economy is not what most people think it is.” 

The dominant misconception, she says, is that circular economy means “designed out of waste,” that it is primarily about recycling and reducing what ends up in landfill. But while that notion is not exactly wrong, it misses the point. “Considering circular economy actually means that when you start thinking about a business, a process, or a product, you also think about what will happen at the end of its lifecycle. This is a huge missing point in a lot of activities, because our entire economic model is built in a different way,” she explains. 

Designing with end-of-life in mind from the very beginning – before the first line of code is written, before the first unit is manufactured, before the first harvest is planned, before the first blueprint is drawn – is a fundamentally different orientation than adding sustainability considerations later. True, it is harder, and it requires changing how problems are framed before they even become problems. But it is, Kekkonen argues, the only version of sustainability that actually holds. 

Why a business school? 

One might wonder why a business school is running projects on food systems, forestry, and related matters at all, since they are not traditional MBA territory. 

Well, the answer is more interesting than it might seem. According to Aleksandra, a business school brings something to these problems that a purely scientific institution does not. And what is that? The ability to translate findings into business models, operational frameworks, and practical strategies that the private sector can actually use!  

When research shows that a region’s food supply chain has a critical vulnerability, that insight only matters if someone can help the businesses in that chain understand how to respond. “Though these topics are a bit far from the traditional business world application, how we perform is very connected. And of course, we have interdisciplinary expertise to provide contribution for projects’ implementation,” she points out.  

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RegioFoodS is funded by the Estonian Research Council and the European Commission under the Mobilitas 3.0 programme. CO-FOREST is funded by the European Commission.