A week after the moose hunt, the inhabitants of Selkie gather in the village hall for the annual feast, a communal meal to celebrate the traditional beginning of winter. Outside, snow is falling. Inside, raffle tickets are selling fast and a long table is laden with the spoils of the hunt.

I sit down with Matti, his partner Senja and their two young children as they tuck into plates of steaming moose stew, boiled potatoes and red berry sauce.

Matti, Senja and their children

“The signs are there, and the anxiety that comes with climate-change news can be overwhelming,” Matti tells me. “It makes me so sad. I try not to think about it too much.”

Matti is a teacher and commutes to his job in the nearby town of Joensuu.

“I’m trying to reduce my use of the car but it’s hard to work from here. I already work one day in the week from home. How else could I reduce it? I don’t know.”

“We try to recycle everything and grow our own food, like carrots and potatoes,” Senja adds.

Matti believes the solution to climate change is really quite simple - less work and less consumption.

“It’s mostly a societal problem. It’s about giving up the way you live. It can be hard if you’re the first ones to change but it is achievable.”

Senja is not so optimistic about Finland’s chances of creating a less consumer-driven society.

“I think it’s quite hard to achieve, because we have everything, and I don’t think people would like to give up those things.”

After the moose stew, Tero Mustonen takes to the stage at the far end of the hall to announce the start of the much-anticipated raffle. Excited children are dispatched up to the podium to receive their prizes, including hunting jackets, fishing nets, and bags of frozen moose meat.

“We are at a profound crossroads,” he tells me. “The forces that have been unleashed by our greed, our misunderstanding of what nature is and our endless economic idea that it can grow without any checks and balances has come to its end.”

In his log house on the edge of the forest, Tero is working on the next report to the IPCC, which will shape the way governments around the world respond to the challenges of climate change in the coming years.

He’s careful to emphasise that he doesn’t speak on behalf of the UN body, but he says the climate crisis is more urgent than even most reports in the press suggest.

“I think it’s far worse than what we have been discussing in the media. Once we get into the 2030s, 2040s, there will be impacts to the global security and global governance which will be extremely hard to control.

“I would give it eight-to-10 years when we really, really, truly have to do at least two things: one, the emission cuts and secondly, the land use. We will not be able to stop human-induced climate change any more. There will be impacts.”

Tero says it is now a question of mitigation rather than prevention.

Then he says something that I’ve rarely heard from a scientist.

Now is not the time for more study, experiments or peer-reviewed papers, he explains. Now is the time for action.

“What more evidence do we need? The planet is truly shifting. I don’t think we need more science or data as such. We have all the data. We have the technologies. We can disagree on other things, but let us be united on this.”