Eco Systems: Joona Mikkola and Environmental Tech

Joona Mikkola flew to Arizona from Sahel, a transitional ecoclimatic region in Africa where the Sahara fades into the savannah of southern Africa. Joona was there to try to reverse the effects of unsustainable farming practices that have turned miles of forest and scrubland in Sahel into barren sands, leaving families who depend on agriculture for their livelihood, who compose up to 70% of the population (Ickowicz et al. 2012), with nothing to rely on for food. A lack of food security, compounded by unstable government support and the encroaching shadow of climate change have left Sahel in dire shape and drawn climate-tech entrepreneurs like Joona into the fight to reverse the damage.

Joona grew up in Finland. He was raised by his grandfather, who loved the outdoors. His grandfather sometimes brought home fox cubs for the children to play with, and he was an excellent hunter and fisherman; Joona’s mother once said that she didn’t taste chicken until she was 16, because his grandfather always brought home enough game and fish to feed the family.

“I grew up surrounded by nature,” says Joona. “But ever since I was a kid, my intuition was that humanity is committing a slow suicide by destroying the only planet on which we know we can exist.”

SoilWatch is a climate tech startup that provides state-of-the art tools to organizations working to combat the land degradation happening in regions like Sahel. NGOs and other teams have the staff and desire, but they don’t necessarily have resources to develop, say, machine learning algorithms that analyze satellite images to provide continuous feedback on what regions of land deserve their attention, or the latest practices in regenerative agriculture (a practice by which farmers and ranchers renew their land instead of exhausting it) and carbon financing—which links farmers to corporations trying to offset their carbon footprint by giving their carbon to farmers, who in turn sink it into the soil where it’s actually a benefit to the environment.

 Joona assembled a team to provide these three core services to organizations on the front line, so they could focus on their missions without having to worry about their tech. His company was a success, but he saw that to solve the pressing problems in his field, he had to look beyond the private sector.

“After working in climate tech for several years, I realized that there is more research to be done,  not necessarily groundbreaking research in a single discipline, but interdisciplinary research that creates solutions to real-world problems out there in the field.”

Joona decided to look into PhD programs and found that the best one was in Arizona. He applied and joined the Arid Land Resource Sciences Program. He was also selected to be a University Fellow

“I feel really thankful to the Fellows program. It’s definitely helped me to get my research going, and it was a big incentive to come here and do research at this university specifically.”

Joona’s career at the University of Arizona has just begun, but it’s off to a good start, and he already knows what he wants to do after graduation.

“My hope is to connect the environmental sector with proper science and give them the scientific tools to develop projects that help the environment and help communities as well.”