The Finnish Climate Corps: Designing Ecological Care Work as Dignified Labour for an AI-transformed Economy

Abstract

AI displacement is often understood as job loss. This thesis examines what happens before or without formal job loss, when people begin to lose the meaning, recognition, and professional identity they draw from work. It asks whether ecological care work could help restore what income replacement alone cannot.

Using Research through Design, the study combined netnographic analysis of 202 firsthand accounts with interviews, surveys, precedent analysis, design probes, and service blueprinting. It compared 342 instances of ecological work required by Helsinki policies with labour-market data, national skills forecasts, and vocational qualifications.

In the netnographic dataset, only 15% of accounts described job loss. The rest described quieter erosion while employed, freelancing, or seeking work. The thesis calls this broader pattern quiet displacement and identifies nine co-occurring conditions. The most common condition, hollowing out, describes the erosion of meaningful work inside a continuing role.

The policy-to-labour comparison exposed gaps in workforce planning and qualifications. The largest cluster comprised restoration, planting, invasive species control, and habitat management, yet neither of Finland’s two nature-based services qualifications covered this work. These findings shaped the Finnish Climate Corps, a speculative cohort programme combining ecological care work with peer support, reflection, training, and competence recognition. It was designed to fit within existing employment services and could operate without new legislation. The next steps are co-design with affected workers and piloting.

The thesis contributes a vocabulary for quiet displacement, a way to test whether policy commitments have a workforce behind them, and a service concept for dignified transition.