I'm a long way north,
about as far north as people live on planet Earth.
This is the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
I'm travelling south from here
around one of the most beautiful and interesting regions of the world -
Scandinavia.
On the rugged edge of Europe
I'm visiting five Nordic countries...
Incredible, it's incredible.
..travelling through glorious forests and spectacular fjords.
I think Norway has a solid claim
to be the most beautiful country in the world.
I mean, look at it!
Wow. Dogs pulling a car.
It's more than half a million square miles of extremes.
This is low, Bent, this is low. - This is my life.
- Someone's holding on to me, yeah?
- Now breathe, breathe.
- Off we go.
- I'm hoping to understand how they've built
some of the happiest societies on the planet...
Hey, guys. - Morning.
- Good morning.
And who have we got here? Wha...?
- Hello!
- Welcome, welcome.
- This is the most traditional Danish lunch I have seen. - Yes.
- ..and why they now feel they're in the firing line.
SantaPark is a nuclear bunker? - Yes, very much so.
- They are preparing to defend Finland.
- GUNFIRE
Bloody hell.
You're wearing these in urban Sweden? - Yes.
- There's another side to Scandinavia.
- Ready to fire.
- LOUD BANG
I'm travelling through the Scandi countries
of Sweden, Denmark and Norway,
and adding in the wider Nordic family, as well -
Finland and Iceland.
I'm starting here off the Svalbard archipelago,
the most northerly outpost of Norway.
- Do you see it?
- I do, you know.
Frida, what is it?
So it's a blue fox
A blue fox? - Yeah.
It's a genetic mutation in the polar foxes
and it's actually really rare.
It's more rare to see a blue fox than to see a polar bear.
- Look at it bouncing along.
- Yeah!
- You're smiling, as well. - Yeah, super nice!
- Frida Schatvet left behind life as a nurse in mainland Norway
to explore and protect the natural wonders of Svalbard
on this scientific research boat.
How often have you seen a blue fox?
- Seen it three times, four times.
- Three, in how many years?
- I've been here almost eight years. - Whoa!
We are very lucky.
You can clearly see the fox bolting up the hill
just above three reindeer.
- There's loads more reindeer in the hillside.
- Scandinavians first came here in numbers to hunt reindeer and seals
for their meat and skin, and even polar bears for their fur.
Most of all, they came to plunder the riches of the ocean.
Whale! Whale, straight ahead.
It was whales that first drew settlers here in the 1600s.
There was a huge population of whales around Svalbard,
and in one of the first great oil rushes,
the whales were hunted for their oil
to use in soaps and as a fuel in lamps.
Thousands of whales were slaughtered.
The fin whale is one of the largest animals ever.
Unfortunately for the species,
each can yield more than 1,000 gallons of whale oil -
enough to fuel thousands of old lamps.
Quick performance and then it's gone.
Hence the hunting.
But hunting bans were put in place on Svalbard from the 1950s.
Numbers of polar bears and marine mammals, including whales,
have increased dramatically over the decades.
It's proved a simple but successful strategy.
Turns out, one of the best ways to conserve endangered animals
is just to stop killing them.
As an outpost of Scandinavia,
Svalbard is a long way north,
roughly halfway between the Norwegian mainland
and the North Pole.
The temperature up here can drop to minus 30.
There are no trees, hardly anything grows here.
But there are people.
Scientists, biologists, researchers and tourism industry workers,
a couple of thousand hardy souls call this place home.
So, this is the settlement of Longyearbyen.
It is the most northerly town in the world
with more than 1,000 inhabitants.
It's a little bit late now,
but in the morning Frida's going to show me around.
This is very Svalbard, I think.
- Yeah. - Not a car park, but a Ski-Doo park.
- Yeah. Everyone has a snowmobile.
- When you moved here, what were some of the big surprises?
- It is a very tight-knit community.
I mean, we have a hospital on the island, but it's very tiny,
and you don't want to take a risk with newborn babies.
So, all the pregnant women, they get shipped down to the mainland,
Norway, to give birth almost four weeks before.
- Right. - And, I mean, you can't really control where you die,
but you can't be buried here even if you wanted to.
- You can't be buried here? - Not at all, no.
- Oh, because...?
- Yeah, because the permafrost won't decompose your body.
So, we've seen now, over time, as well, that a lot of the whalers,
officials that have been buried many years ago,
their caskets and bodies are just being pushed up... - Oh, my goodness.
- ..by the permafrost.
- Lovely.
You can't be born here and you can't be buried either -
and life in between is spent in the freezer zone.
So, what keeps people here?
It's raw, rugged, and there's adventure
and the Norwegians also sweeten the deal with low tax rates and no VAT.
That's got to help.
Wow, dogs pulling a car.
They're training?
Svalbard!
Norway has wanted to keep a viable community here.
It's keen to maintain a strong presence.
For decades, one of the main reasons that people were on Svalbard
was mining.
And this is one of the last coal mines on Svalbard.
Coal from here fuelled the power station which generates electricity,
and it also helped create a strong local community
of workers and families.
SPEAKS NORWEGIAN
Bent Jakobsen and hundreds of other miners have done the tough work -
yet not for much longer.
- We're going to get in the car.
You'll see, we're going to drive down on the low seam.
- How deep in the mountain are we now?
- We are 6km inside the mountain
and we have 350m of mountains over our heads now.
- Flippin' heck.
- OK, let's go.
Take a seat. - All right.
- There is only one rule when we're driving.
As long as you keep your head lower than the bar, you're fine.
- I was just planning on keeping my head lower than you!
- A fun thing, when I have people in the mine,
they start up here and then they're like this. - Right.
OK. About here. - You will know when we get in there.
- All right, all right.
I'm taking it seriously.
- BELL DINGS - Good. I'll ring the bell.
Bloody hell, Bent, this is low, isn't it?
- No, this is quite high, actually. - Really? - Yes.
It's going to get lower, so keep your head down.
- OK, now it's low. - Like, this is low. - This is low, Bent, this is low.
- The thing when you start working here,
either you love it or you hate it. There's nothing in between.
- And you loved it right from the beginning?
- This is my life.
- Oh, goodness, we're right at the end.
- If you step out on the right side, I'll show you something. - OK.
- This is actually like a mining tunnel.
Actually, here you see the coal seam.
Grab a hand of coal if you want.
- This is the compressed value
of sunlight and plants,
flowers, trees,
has been your life, Bent.
- Yes, it has.
- For so long. - Yeah.
But soon coming to an end.
- How do you feel about that? - Yeah, of course it's sad.
It's a long, proud tradition of miners,
or mining that's going to be gone.
- And the reason?
- First of all, we don't have actually enough good quality coal,
that's one thing. And another one is the green shift is here also.
So, mining is not, or should I say, not very popular any more.
- And so ends a tradition of mining
not just for you or your family, but for this community.
- Yeah, we are 70 guys, that's out of work or out of a job.
Yeah, we're done. So...
- What will you do? - I have no idea.
We'll see.
I'll probably get a job somewhere.
- The mine closure is tough for Bent, and Svalbard.
Despite a growing tourism industry,
fewer people here are permanent residents -
and that's not great news for Norway,
which is desperate to maintain control over Svalbard,
because as the Arctic warms and melts,
Svalbard's situated in a globally strategic position,
on an increasingly important shipping lane
with huge mineral resources and fishing in the ocean around.
Other countries want a slice, including Russia.
Under international agreements, Norway is in charge of Svalbard
but it has to share Svalbard with other countries.
That can lead to tensions.
I'm off to meet the neighbours.
Russians have been coming to Svalbard for centuries,
hunting furs originally.
In 1920, a treaty was signed in Paris giving Svalbard to Norway,
but Russians are among those allowed to travel here without visas
and to settle here.
There are whole Russian towns.
I have to say, I'm feeling quite apprehensive
about going to this community.
It's called Barentsburg.
This is a Russian outpost,
a Russian base,
a settlement up here in the very far north.
There were relations between the Russian settlement
and the main Norwegian community here.
And then Russia invaded Ukraine
and relationships here have got decidedly frosty.
Russia recently downgraded Norway as a country from unfriendly
to very unfriendly.
Russia is THE dominant power in the Arctic.
President Putin has claimed as it melts, natural resources
like oil and gas, worth trillions, will become available
so Russia's been upgrading its naval forces
and building bases across the Arctic.
All right, just need to work out what's going on
and what we can film, and then...
..hopefully, we can get a sense of the place.
They're flying the bloody Soviet flag here.
That's astonishing.
There's a coal mine on the Russian side too,
owned by the state-owned mining company which also controls
almost everything else in the town.
I headed for the mining company HQ where the general director
had agreed to meet me.
Or so I thought.
Hi. Darea? - Daria. - Daria, Simon.
- Now we're going to have a short meeting with general director.
- OK. All right. - Welcome.
- It turned out the general director had had a change of heart.
- And I think it's better to leave the equipment outside the office
because he doesn't want that you can...
- He doesn't want to be filmed?
Well, that was weird.
It was a sort of slightly farcical situation.
If you're going to design a Russian bureaucrat
who's living in the middle of nowhere, it would be him.
Big office, big table,
very starched, white ironed shirt and a tie,
photograph of President Putin there, looked very stern.
Basically, he won't talk to us and he's palmed us off
to a young interpreter.
At least she's going to show us around.
I felt a bit guilty Daria had been lumbered with us -
but it turned out it wasn't her first rodeo.
She took me straight to the number one tourist site.
- Well, usually...
..journalists stop here and...
..make the interview on this spot.
- We've got a statue of Lenin here. - Mm.
- Still standing. - Still standing.
- Looking around, and we can very clearly see
Russia is definitely back here and there is a sizeable community.
What is the plan? What is the future for Barentsburg?
- For sure, we will continue coal mining
and develop tourism.
So we're trying to make this place as attractive as possible
- LOUD ENGINE RUMBLES for tourists.
So, the tourism boycott and Western sanctions,
the plan is not to shut this place down,
you are actually expanding it
and you are hoping more people will come.
- Mm. Yeah, that's true.
A lot of people are romantics, you know,
who come here - or adventurous,
because they want to travel around the world,
see as many places as possible.
- What's he saying? - He says some rude words.
Just don't pay attention.
I don't think that they are locals.
I have never seen them here before.
- Hmm, well, I've heard worse.
Like Norway, the Kremlin wants Russians to settle here
and they've stumped-up for spanking new facilities
to act as encouragement.
- This is our swimming pool.
- Oh, my good lord.
It is not cheap.
It costs a lot of money to do this, doesn't it?
- Yeah. But it is free for locals.
We swim here for free.
- Despite sanctions, some suggest Russia still makes
half a billion pounds a day in oil and gas exports.
They've got money and have plans for more investment in Svalbard,
including a science complex involving China and Iran.
Meanwhile, the Russian Navy plies the seas around Svalbard,
and the Kremlin now questions how Norway runs the islands.
It's good vodka.
Russia has also been accused of sabotaging
critical undersea internet cables here and right around Scandinavia.
There's lots going on here that feels like it's out of the pages
of a Cold War spy thriller.
One of the communication cables linking Svalbard
to the outside world was cut not long ago.
And the prime suspect is a Russian fishing trawler
that was tracked going backwards and forwards over the cable
that runs under the sea about 100 times.
It feels like there is a bit of a scramble for the far north,
for the mineral wealth that is up here.
But also, just to have this land as real estate, really,
because controlling it means you can control access
to the North Atlantic.
And for Russia's naval fleet,
they need to come round the top of Scandinavia
to get into the North Atlantic.
They need to come pretty close to Svalbard.
Remember, Russia is just across the border from Scandinavia,
and many Scandinavians really feel that presence.
Russia has denied allegations of interference.
It was time to leave Svalbard.
In mid-winter, I travelled to Lapland
in the northernmost region of Finland.
It's one of the wildest areas of Europe.
It looks utterly ethereal
in the early morning light.
Incredible. Incredible.
I was heading towards the edge of Europe -
Finland's historically bloody border with Russia,
Europe's longest at more than 800 miles.
It was brutally cold, minus 30 centigrade.
The moisture in my nose is freezing up.
This is a very tough time of year
in a very tough part of the world.
The cold, the bitter cold,
it seeps through every gap and crevice in your clothing.
I've lost my guide, I can't see him ahead.
I'd better speed up.
A history of war looms over this magical frozen wilderness.
Time and again, Finland has been invaded from the east.
Under Russian Tsar Peter the Great, horrific atrocities
committed against the Finns became known as the Great Wrath.
During World War II, the Soviet Red Army invaded,
and Finland sided with Germany.
In the Cold War that followed the country became neutral,
always nervously watching the Russian bear next door.
Oh!
- OK, Simon, this is as far as we can go.
The Russia border is just right over there, 150 metres.
- It's just there. - Yes, just there,
and there's nothing between us and the border.
- Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022,
tensions have ramped up.
There's a sign up here.
Border Zone.
There's no fence.
but it's very definitely a border now -
a closed border, as well,
for many months.
Opinion polls in Finland show that more than 80% of Finns
fear and think that Russia poses a military threat to the country.
The Finns say Russia has weaponised this border
by bussing hundreds of migrants and refugees here
and encouraging them to cross, in an attempt to destabilise Finland.
The border's now permanently shut.
The gates closed.
Even in magical Lapland, thoughts and fears about future conflict
are never that far way.
As I found when I travelled west.
PEOPLE LAUGH AND CHEER
This is very strange.
It's not Christmas,
but it is here, 365 days of the year.
They now make huge amounts of money here in Lapland
and attract hundreds of thousands of tourists every single year
by branding Lapland as the real home of Father Christmas -
despite the fact that we are hundreds of miles away here
from the North Pole, which is where I rather stupidly thought
Father Christmas actually lives.
This is called Santa's Village.
There's been fierce competition from towns in Sweden, Norway, Greenland
and Alaska to be seen as the authentic home
of Santa Claus - Father Christmas.
But it's here, Rovaniemi in Finland, that seems to be the winner.
Billions have been invested here,
and tourists now come from around the world.
Yeah, it is pretty damn impressive, really,
that the Finns have built this luxury tourism economy here
in a very hostile, extreme environment.
At the end of the Second World War,
large parts of their towns and cities
were reduced to ash and rubble,
and they were really poor,
and they have built one of the most extraordinary countries
on planet Earth.
Dozens of Santa-themed resorts and attractions
have sprung up around Rovaniemi.
This one's called Santa Claus Secret Forest,
set up by local businessman Ilkka Lankinen.
Ilkka? - Yes.
- Ilkka, hello. - Hello, hello, good morning.
- Simon Reeve. - Good morning. - Is it possible to come in? - Yeah.
Hey, good morning, good morning. Welcome, welcome. - Good morning.
What brought you to Lapland?
- I came here to study forestry,
and forestry is still quite big here in Finland and Lapland.
- Forestry is a massive industry in Finland, isn't it?
- It is. - I read that you have 13,000 trees per person.
- Yes, but travel and tourism industry is larger than the forest industry -
and that's something that people don't many times realise,
but this is much larger than the forest industry. - Wow.
You've really managed to turn Lapland into...
..some would see it as the ultimate Christmas experience, really.
- Yes, we are creating the best Christmas experiences in the world.
- And what have we got here? Wha...?
- Hello!
- Welcome, welcome.
Oh, yes! - Oh, yes! - Oh, yes! Are you all right?
- I think so. - Oh!
- I'm surprised to see you.
- Why? You didn't expect elves in the forest?
- No, I didn't expect elves in the forest.
How stupid of me!
- Right here, we are in front of one of our toy factories.
- Go. He's got a sharp knife, just in case.
This is what I would have imagined.
- Ah! - Yes.
- Santa's toy factory to be.
- Yes.
Come, we go this way. - We'll go this way quickly.
- Hello. - What an honour to see you here.
- It's nice and warm here.
- It's definitely nice and warm.
There is a significant risk of us overheating in here, Ilkka.
- Well, it's not that hot.
And, you know, besides, you can always take a step outside,
and then I think that problem would disappear quite quickly.
- You are so right.
- Since you are here in Lapland,
maybe we should give you a little reminder of our meeting.
So, here's a little remin... - Thank you very much.
- This is our fluffiest reindeer that they'll be able to make here.
- This is, this is indeed a very fluffy reindeer. - Yes.
- Thank you very much indeed. - You're very welcome.
- Oh, wow.
Ilkka's stuck with the theme.
He also owns SantaPark, an underground shopping centre
where visitors from around the world can meet Father Christmas
and his army of little helpers.
But there's a little bit more to this grotto
than reindeer and Christmas stockings.
- Going to show you something that I normally won't share,
but let's have a quick peek.
- Literally behind the sign.
- So now we are actually entering for the restricted kind of space.
I mean, if you look at the doors.
- Oh, my goodness, look at the size of that beast!
- And it's made from 50mm steel -
and this is the first set of doors.
- This is...
This is a bunker? - Yes.
Nothing, no missile or anything can penetrate this.
- SantaPark is also a nuclear bunker?
- Yes, very much so.
- Oh, my good lordy.
So how far do the tunnels extend?
- About 400 metres.
And we have several sets of tunnels, because in the case of emergency,
you have to get in the people, you have to get in all the supplies
and everything. So you can drive a semi-truck inside here.
- An articulated lorry?
- Yes, yes. - My goodness.
How many people can you house here?
- Over 3,000. 3,400.
- So, you have, presumably, the kit, equipment,
bedding, food and stores here for that.
- Bedding, toilets, dry toilets.
We have our own water supplies,
we have our own waste supplies.
And Finns are always prepared,
because we must have a shelter for all the Finns -
but Finns are also very creative
because if we would not have SantaPark here, then the city people
will pay for the heating and electricity and everything.
So, we have utilised all the shelters for swimming pools,
tennis, swimming centres, tennis places, inside tracks.
And this happened to be the Christmas Santa's home cavern.
- So go to a swimming pool in Finland
and you may well actually be inside...
- A shelter. - A shelter... - A public shelter, yes.
- ..from a nuclear war. - Yes, yes.
- Across Finland, there are more than 50,000 bunkers
to shelter almost the entire population of more than five million
in the event of war.
- We're not going to go any further.
- This is another exit, entrance to the bunker? - Yes, yes.
- DOOR SLAMS
Like a huge number of Finns of all backgrounds,
Ilkka's also an army reservist, an officer.
He trains at a local rifle range.
- So, we're going to take a big, big boy.
- OK, right.
So, what have you got in here?
- This is what we call long distance rifle.
- There are hundreds of shooting ranges across Finland,
and for national defence the government's opening 300 more.
Finns have one of the highest rates of gun ownership,
after countries like the US and Yemen.
Morning.
- Good morning. - Good morning. - This is Janne. - Janne.
- Janne, Simon. Lovely to see you. - Hello. - Hello.
Yanne is a university lecturer and also an army reservist.
It's the sheer number of reservists in the Finnish Armed Forces
that make their military huge in terms of numbers.
They have a military -
total military, combined, including reserves -
of nearly 900,000.
That's five times the size of the UK's Armed Forces
of around 180,000,
even though the UK's population is 12 times larger than Finland's.
LOUD GUNSHOT
It's almost like a piece of artillery.
Very powerful.
LOUD GUNSHOT
I think what really surprises me
about your armed reserve is just the scale of it.
- Some might call Finland the Sparta of the North.
I think the model is that the civil society defends itself,
not outsourcing it.
So, everyone's responsible for the society.
- And you've got the Finnish flag and you've got the Freedom Flag as well.
- Yeah. And when I talked about the society taking responsibility
of defending itself, I think that covers all of your values.
So, for example, if one of these things is part of your values,
if you're not ready to defend them, even with violence,
do you really believe in them?
Are they values or are they just opinions?
- You're saying if you believe in the values of the Freedom Flag,
then you need to be willing to defend those.
- Yeah, exactly.
- And that is a possibility.
- Unfortunately so, yeah.
- RAPID GUNFIRE
It might seem unthinkable elsewhere in Western Europe,
but they fear war here.
It's happened before,
and, as a result, Finland is a highly militarised country.
There's conscription.
Each year, more than 20,000 young men and women
head off for military training.
I'm really quite moved by this.
Just seeing these youngsters marching across.
People's sons.
People's daughters.
National Service is compulsory for men, voluntary for women.
When it's finished they join the reserves and are liable
to be called up for refresher training until the age of 50.
It's a doctrine of total defence.
Under the Finnish constitution,
all citizens have a duty to defend the nation.
This is total belief in the country,
trust in the state.
Trust that the state will do the right thing
and the state will, through its people, protect everyone.
Surveys have shown 80% of Finns support compulsory National Service.
SIMON CHUCKLES
It is quite something to see.
I've come to see the Jaeger Brigade, an elite Arctic warfare unit.
They're in charge of training green young conscripts
in cold weather combat.
INSTRUCTS IN FINNISH
Youngsters leave behind
often comfortable, warm lives in cities and towns
to be turned into soldiers.
GUNFIRE
Are you happy with that?
- Well, it was the first time.
I'm not happy for every individual.
But anyway, they are doing what they should do at the moment, yeah.
- So this is their first time shooting from skis?
- Yeah, I think so.
At least it looked like it was. - Right.
But they're also, they're less familiar with skis
and they're more familiar with central heating.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. And telephones and so on.
- Yeah! - Yeah.
Well, they are preparing to defend Finland.
That is the purpose for the whole thing.
- In opinion polls, more than 80% of all Finns
say they'd defend their country.
In a similar poll of Brits, it was only 35%.
What is it about Finland that means you feel such a part of the country
that you are willing to defend it in that way?
- We all love Finland, even if it's cold, even if it's dark.
- It feels like it's our obligation to defend the country.
In my opinion, the greatest country in the world
and something to defend.
I mean, we have a very good standard of living,
best education, and we are wealthy
and we have gotten everything we ever could ask for from Finland.
So it's only right that we defend it.
- After the invasion of Ukraine,
Finland and neighbouring Sweden have joined the NATO military alliance,
as protection from the Russian threat.
But the Finns are their own force to be reckoned with.
Apart from a massive army, they have the largest artillery force
in Western Europe - hundreds of huge howitzers.
But they also bring something less easy to rate and measure -
passion, patriotism and knowledge.
What they're teaching the conscripts here
isn't just how to be a soldier,
it's how to survive
in these extremely harsh conditions.
The Jaeger Brigade teach Arctic warfare to soldiers
from other NATO countries, including the UK and US.
Bloody hell.
- Students are learning how to rescue themselves
in case if they go through the weak ice.
- INSTRUCTOR SPEAKS FINNISH
Tell us about this word, this Finnish word, "sisu".
- Sisu. - What does it mean?
- Ah, I guess it's sort of a...
..some kind of a Finnish version of some kind of grit.
- Grit. - Grit, or something like that.
That's probably the closest English word.
- Guts. - Guts, yes.
- It's a big thing in Finland and it's something you try to cultivate?
- Yeah. Yeah.
This is one example.
- Yeah. - This is sisu.
- This is proper sisu. - Yeah, yeah.
- They're pretty quiet when they go in.
They're doing well.
- Screaming doesn't help. - Screaming doesn't...!
SIMON LAUGHS
Maybe we all need a bit of extra sisu.
Oh, my God.
Little bit of me is keen to test myself.
And a lot of me is definitely not.
- Last time we met, you were smiling.
Do I see you smiling again?
- Well, sort of.
- Of course, because this is absolutely great fun.
- Yeah, that's exactly the phrase I would use.
- Put this on one shoulder. - Oh, my God.
- OK, are you ready?
- Somebody's holding on to me, yeah?
- Are you ready? - Ah, yeah, I think so.
- You can go. - Is anyone ever?
Oh, my God.
- Now breathe, breathe.
Good.
Bring your backpack here.
- SIMON BREATHES DEEPLY
- Yes, like that.
Get your skis. - Oh, my God.
- Both skis.
- Ah, it's really sharp.
- Take your pole.
Now, use your arms, use your legs.
Exactly like that.
Almost there.
Keep moving, keep crawling.
Little bit more.
Remove the rope.
Good job, good job. - Thank you, guys.
Oh! - All right, Simon?
- Now, get warm. - Yeah. - OK.
The Finns, they're a little bit bonkers
but they really believe in this sisu.
And you know what? They start them young.
Patriotism and a whopping army aren't what most of us associate
with Scandinavia and the wider region.
Just like its Scandi neighbours, Finland also cherishes
liberal values like gender equality, gay rights
and a generous welfare state.
As a country, it scores near the top for wealth, health and happiness.
And they start encouraging all those Nordic values,
plus a dose of sisu, even in their toddlers.
They've very kindly let us come and see a Finnish school.
It is minus 18 Centigrade.
CHILDREN: - Good morning.
Welcome to Salla.
- Hello to you. Look, a lovely wave.
Hello, hello, hello!
- They're asking if you are coming with us to the forest?
- Yes!
These three- to six-year-olds are off out to forest school -
hours outside.
The head teacher, Josefiina Marola,
only takes them inside when the temperature drops below
minus 30 degrees.
They're different in Finland.
It is a little surprising to me to see...
..really, really young children going off in these conditions.
But...they have just a different mentality in Finland.
- It's a matter of wearing enough layers.
It's not really cold, like, right now.
- No, I've got about 47 layers on.
If you can go to that sort of level, then, yeah. - But you can...
- You can be OK. - ..put 47 layers on, and you will be fine. - Yes.
CHILDREN SHRIEK
Formal education here doesn't start until kids are seven.
Before that they're playing.
In Finland, it's all about the great outdoors,
about getting mucky and not endless worrying about health and safety.
What are the advantages of raising children this way?
- They don't get sick.
They sleep well.
They learn things more naturally. They have more space.
- Do the kids get colds a lot?
- No, hardly ever. - Right.
- No.
Their immune system is just really good.
They don't get colds or get sick at all.
I mean, it's minus 20 and something, but, yeah.
And what I think is like the most important thing about going
to school and growing up is that they get along together.
Their social skills are just like, great, I think.
When they're in the forest they just naturally, like, help each other,
and no-one gets left behind.
I don't know why it happens.
Maybe it's just the forest is such, like, a calming place.
- CHILDREN CHATTER
Forest schools boost children's immune systems.
Finnish scientists claim contact with nature,
with mud and friendly bacteria,
prevents autoimmune diseases and allergies.
Teachers here don't mollycoddle.
They keep watch, but children are allowed to take risks.
Yes, even leaping off anti-tank defences left from the war.
- When we know the children well
and we know the whole family and stuff,
it's easy to, you know, build a trust.
I think education overall
just is like a really, really respected thing in Finland.
- So, respect and trust are two key words that leap out at me there.
- Well, yeah definitely.
Yeah, and they don't really question the things we do here.
And if the teacher says it's OK to be outside, then it is.
- What a difference with the UK, where teachers too often face parents
who don't trust or respect them.
Here there were no complaints from the hardy youngsters
or at school pick-up time.
You're happy for Josefiina to take your precious son
into the forest when it is minus 18 up there?
- Yes, because I know my son will survive.
- THEY LAUGH
You have a lot of respect for education
and educators, for teachers.
- Yes.
- You trust them. - Yes, very much.
- Well, this has been fascinating, mind-blowing even.
I'm hearing a lot about trust.
And trust is something I'm really interested in.
People in Scandinavia and the Nordic countries have much higher levels
of trust in their institutions, their governments and each other.
As this journey goes on I'm really keen to learn the role
that trust plays in making Scandinavia such a success.
I headed west through Lapland's vast forests
and crossed the border into Sweden.
Lapland is a region of 150,000 square miles
across northern Finland, Sweden, Norway
and even a small bit of Russia.
During winter it's buried under snow,
but Lapland's still a major provider of resources.
Swedes chop and plant millions of trees up here
for all that flat-pack furniture.
Lapland's also important for green energy.
Hydroelectric power provides 40% of Sweden's electricity,
but requires power lines and railways crisscrossing Lapland.
During the 20th century, Europe often outsourced
its extraction of fossil fuels and heavy industry as well to...
..poorer, less developed parts of the world.
But during what's being described as the green transition now
to renewable energy, there will be a need for a huge number of mines,
solar farms, wind turbines, wind farms,
and that will cause problems with other people, with other groups.
Lapland's home to the Sami people.
They've lived here for thousands of years -
long before modern countries -
with their own language and culture,
for many, inextricably linked to the reindeer.
I'm meeting a reindeer herder called Mikael.
I've got a pin on a map
where we've got to meet him in the middle of nowhere.
Once nomadic, the Sami are now mostly settled.
They still keep and herd reindeer.
Sami elder Mikael Kuhmunen makes his living out here.
Mikael. - Hello. - Hi, Mikael, Simon.
- Mikael. Very lovely to see you
The same.
- Hello, lads. Good morning. - Hello.
- SIMON LAUGHS
So...
..where are the reindeer?
- They are up there.
- Right, OK.
- We're going to move the reindeers away from there,
take them down to the road and then...
- ENGINE TURNS OVER
- ..the reindeers will probably follow the road.
- And how many - how many reindeer do you have?
- That's a funny question.
You don't ask anyone how many reindeers they have. - Oh...
- It's quite... - It's not polite. - It's not polite.
It's like asking you how much money you have in the bank. - Right.
- It's the same question. But I have reindeers so I can survive.
- SIMON CHUCKLES
- We're going to make a snowmobile track here so...
I'm quite lazy, I let the sons do the job.
- SIMON LAUGHS
- Reindeers, they should not be too long in the same place.
That's why we herd the reindeers, move them from one place to another.
- Right. - So they don't destroy the grazing area.
- So they'll move in search of food,
but that can obviously split them up and move them apart too far
and also presumably expose them to danger as well.
- Yes, a couple of years ago we had about 50 reindeers,
they went out on the railway and they were hit by a train.
It was nothing left of them.
- 50 reindeer were killed... - By one train. - By one train.
Oh, my goodness.
- So then we learned the lesson.
We are very afraid of the train, of the railroads.
- How do you avoid that?
- We can't. We can only take away the reindeers from the danger.
This is something that has made our lives more easy.
- Mm.
- We are experts to adapt ourselves, and every new thing, we take it.
OK, now we go up in the air.
- DRONE WHIRS
Reindeer used to roam wherever they liked.
Now, there are dangers everywhere.
Mikael and his sons, Aslat and Nils, are worried about a small group
from their herd that have strayed too close to railway tracks.
We need to find them.
So there's the reindeer. - Yes.
Then I put the GPS spot on it.
So now I see on the map, and then I can show my sons where they are.
- Clever, clever.
SNOWMOBILE STARTS
So, we're heading out to look for the reindeer.
Reindeer are tough, yet they still need looking after.
They're crucial to the ecosystem in Lapland,
but forests rich in lichen, the reindeers' favourite food,
have declined by 71% in Sweden.
OK, so the reindeer, there's reindeer just ahead of us,
and they're being corralled by the lads and by our Ski-Doos,
and hopefully they're moving in the right direction.
OK, they've got them into the open
and they're now... Ooh! ..moving them towards the road.
We gently guided them away from the train tracks...
..but roads, tracks, industry, people -
it's all disrupting reindeer behaviour and migration.
Even new green industries up here pose threats to wildlife
and the livelihoods of Sami herders.
That's it, they've reached the road.
And so have we.
SNOWMOBILE ENGINE PUTTERS OUT
What are they doing, Mikael? - They are eating salt.
Yesterday, it was ice on the road so they put salt on.
Now they... - They love it. - They love it.
- Of course, like a salt lick almost.
- Yes.
When they once find the salt, they will always come back.
It's like a drug.
- And they're drawn to the road to eat it,
and that presumably results in collisions. - Yes.
Most of the people that are driving car they say that reindeer,
it is the most stupid animal on the earth.
- Right!
- Because they stand on the salt
just waiting to get hit by a car.
- So that affects...that affects their migration, their movement,
your ability to herd them? - Yes, it does.
We are already so affected by everything you can imagine.
We have the railroad,
we have the hydropower dam
just 15km away from here,
power lines.
- How do the power lines affect you and the reindeer?
- They stopped before the power line.
There's something that we don't see,
something is scaring them.
They avoid the power lines.
We don't need no more, erm...
..more things that affect us.
- It's so difficult, isn't it, because obviously people will say
that Lapland needs development, it needs jobs?
But, understandably, you see your way of life being threatened.
- I see it that way, yes.
It's like... It's like a lifestyle that's slowly fading away.
- The major threat here's climate change.
The Arctic's heating nearly four times faster
than the rest of the planet.
It's simply not as cold as it is normally.
- This kind of snow, it's usually in the springtime.
Now we're in the middle of the winter,
it should be 30, 30 minus.
- Should it really? - Yes, but now it's almost 10.
- So you're caught, really, in a terrible Catch-22, I sense,
where on the one hand you're seeing climate change...
- I have seen it for almost 20 years now.
- ..and on the other hand, you're threatened by the industry
that is being developed to try and help prevent
or at least mitigate the climate change that we're all threatened by.
A rock and a hard place.
- The ones who get sacrificed, it's us,
we, the reindeers, the reindeer herders, the Sami people.
The thing I wonder why,
why do you have to destroy the planet to save it?
It doesn't make sense to me. - Mm.
ENGINES TURN OVER
Not far from where Mikael herds his reindeer
is the small Swedish mining town of Kiruna.
Legend says, in the mid 1600s,
a farmer, hunting squirrels, found a strange heavy black rock here.
Turned out it was iron ore.
Kiruna's grown up around what's now a vast underground iron ore mine,
the biggest in the world.
All the mining and tunnelling underground has, of course,
turned to land here, this area,
into Swiss cheese,
and it's destabilised many of the buildings here,
and as a result, a number of them have got to be destroyed,
and a large part of the town here has got to be moved.
So some of the buildings here, they're actually just relocating.
This huge old church, for example, they're going to jack that up
and then later this year, they're going to move it to a new
location at the very stately pace of half a mile an hour.
Much of Kiruna's being moved so they can keep digging underground,
because, for Sweden, and for Europe, the mine is vital.
Geologist Laura Lauri works for LKAB,
the state-owned Swedish mining company.
They've extracted more than two billion tons of iron ore
from this mine alone.
By one reckoning, that's equivalent to the top third of Mount Everest.
We headed in.
- Here you see the mine entrance.
So, this is the largest underground iron ore mine in the world.
It's about 80% of what we use in Europe.
- 80% of Europe's iron ore comes from...comes from here? - Yeah.
I guess that if you have products that have been produced in Europe
that contain steel, then it mostly comes from here.
- Well, this is very definitely not like the mine in Svalbard.
- So we will just park the car here. - All right.
We were nearly a mile underground,
a subterranean world of huge tunnels, offices,
a staff canteen, coffee machines,
even pot plants.
Hiya. Hello, hello, hello.
It's one of the most high-tech mines in the world
and Emil is a very modern sort of miner.
Hello. - Hello.
- What are you doing?
- I'm remote operating.
I have my cameras on the machine.
- Yeah.
- And I also have rock breaker to break the larger boulders.
- Oh, my goodness.
- So now I just press the button and now it's going to dump the bucket.
- Well, what's going on? It's driving itself. - Yeah.
It's driving itself, it's autonomously.
So, I'm always going to the ore pass,
and it dumps the rock down the ore pass.
- Right. - And then it returns to the drift where I fill the bucket.
- So this is a very new style mining, isn't it?
Where are the hard calluses on your hands? No.
- No. - Where is your pick and shovel?
- No pick and shovel here.
- Now you have a joystick!
- Yeah, a joystick and an Xbox control.
- Now, we mustn't film this, because all the youngsters watching,
who are playing on their consoles will say,
"Look, Mum and Dad, this is why I need to be gaming,
"so I can work in a Swedish mine." - Exactly.
So now I shake the bucket. - Look.
No, you're not. - Yeah. - Go on, give the bucket a little shake.
Oh, my goodness.
You seem very happy with your job. - Yeah. Yeah, I love my job.
This is very fun.
- Miles underground, machines do most of the dangerous and grubby work.
Machines bring the iron ore to the surface -
and if something goes wrong, there's someone, or something,
who goes to investigate.
This looks like a kennel.
- It does look like a kennel.
Whoa!
- Oh, my goodness.
The robot reconnaissance dog
can be sent into the most dangerous parts of the mine.
I was a little bit taken aback.
That was my first time, anywhere on the planet,
I've encountered a moving robotic creature, as it were.
What can Spot do?
- After the blasting, it checks if something has happened,
if there has been any rock falls.
- This is, like, the future of mining here, isn't it? - Yes.
- Taking humans... not out of the equation,
but out of the danger zone.
- Out of the danger, yes. Yeah.
- Come on, you've got to see this.
Look.
I'll bring it out.
They really have put dog treats in here.
HE LAUGHS
The miners and their machines are still exploring underground here,
hunting for more iron deep beneath the snows of Lapland.
But a couple of years ago they made a startling discovery
which could be a game-changer for the whole of Europe,
and for the future of green technology.
- Under this forested area, here,
we have another iron ore body which contains quite a lot of iron,
phosphorus and also rare earth elements.
- Rare earth elements.
- Most used ones are, for instance are neodymium and praseodymium,
that are used for example for wind turbines and battery technology.
- There's 17 rare earth minerals,
including samarium, europium and scandium.
They're critical for next-generation tech.
What coal was to the 19th century, and oil to the 20th,
rare earth elements could be to the 21st.
- So, I've got a couple of pieces of drill core
and there's quite a lot of those pink and whitish minerals here -
and that's the mineral apatite,
the phosphorus mineral that contains also the rare earths.
We have numbers that show that this deposit,
it's almost one billion tons of ore.
- That's billion with a B?
- Yeah, one billion tons of ore.
- Here, these are the fundamentals
of...potentially of Europe's future economy.
- It's really true.
And this only strengthens the importance of this region.
- This is geopolitics, right here.
The great powers are now scrambling to secure rare earth minerals.
China currently has most of them.
Europe doesn't produce any.
This mine could change that.
The environment here will be affected -
perhaps we don't have a choice -
but it's a consequence we shouldn't ignore.
You can see a train down here, taking out iron ore.
What's happening here is really important.
Europe is going to need these rare earth minerals and metals
if we are going to transition to a cleaner, greener future -
but there are costs.
Next time, I'm in western Scandinavia...
Orca!
..exploring the fjords of Norway...
..and further west, the volcanoes of Iceland.
Need to get out of here.
I'm on the rugged edge of Europe,
visiting five Nordic countries.
Incredible. It's incredible.
Travelling through glorious forests
and spectacular fjords.
I think Norway has a solid claim
to be the most beautiful country in the world.
I mean, look at it!
Wow. Dogs pulling a car.
It's more than half a million square miles of extremes.
This is low, Bent. This is low.
- This is my life.
- Somebody's holding on to me, yeah?!
- Now breathe, breathe.
- Off we go.
- I'm hoping to understand how they built
some of the happiest societies on the planet...
Hey, guys. - Morning.
LAUGHTER - Good morning.
And who have we got here?
What...?
- Hello! - Welcome, welcome! LAUGHTER
- This is the most traditional Danish lunch I have seen. - Yes.
- ..and why they now feel they're in the firing line.
Santa Park is also a nuclear bunker?
- Yes. Very much so.
- They are preparing to defend Finland.
- GUNFIRE
Bloody hell.
You're wearing these in urban Sweden?
- Yes.
- There's another side to Scandinavia.
- Ready to fire?
- On this second leg of my Scandinavian journey,
I'm travelling from the west coast of Norway
across the North Atlantic to the volcanic island of Iceland.
Norway's shoreline is gouged and carved
by spectacular fjords and islands -
almost a quarter of a million islands -
along the longest coast in Europe.
Second longest in the world.
Rex is checking out the coastline here.
It is fairly astonishing.
Norway does have an almost excessively rugged,
jagged, fragmented coastline.
Since the time of the Vikings,
when they weren't out doing a spot of pillaging,
people here have fished and farmed their sheep.
For Roy and Inger Oksnes, this is home.
They're taking me to a small island where they keep their family flock.
Let's go. Are you ready to go?
- After you. - All right.
Well, I think the dog is going to be doing most of the work
ROY WHISTLES
Hey, look, there they are.
ROY WHISTLES
I sense Rex wants to round up the sheep.
Tell us what to do, Roy.
ROY WHISTLES
Er, they're making a break!
ROY SHOUTS
Ah-ah-ah!
There's a breakaway flock over there.
Another flock over here.
I mean, they do say a flock of sheep comes with a flock of problems.
- So, Simon, did you get the speed? Heating up?
- I'm warming up Roy, I am. - You're warming up?
- It gets the blood flowing, that's for sure.
- You feel the blood flowing, blood flowing, very good.
- You love it, don't you? I can tell!
- Yes, and we get some exercise out of it.
- Mush! Mush! Mush!
Roy's family have farmed these remote islands for generations.
Each year, when summer arrives,
it's shearing time for Roy and his burly lads -
or rather for the sheep.
There we go.
- Well done, guys. - And they're in.
After Vikings here put down their battle axes,
Norway spent centuries as almost a rural backwater of Scandinavia.
Only around 3% of the land is farmable.
The sea up here is harsh and dangerous.
Many struggled.
What was life like here for your parents, your grandparents?
Other Scandis viewed Norwegians as country bumpkins.
They were the butt of jokes.
- 50ml...
- Then, 50 years ago, everything changed
when the Norwegians hit the national equivalent of a Vegas jackpot.
So, it's 9:30 on a Wednesday,
and Roy is off to work.
So, this is where you work?
- Yes. I work on the other side of the plant.
- Look at the size of this.
This tangled eruption of pipes and chimneys is Mongstad...
..home to Norway's biggest oil and gas refinery.
Roy is one of more than 1,000 people working here.
You wear it well.
Ah, it's the belt, isn't it?
Roy's family farm is now just a sideline.
During the week, he works for Equinor,
Norway's largely state-owned oil and gas company.
He belongs to a lucky generation of Norwegians
gifted one of history's biggest Christmas presents.
All right.
It was the night before Christmas Eve, 1969.
Norway discovered oil in the North Sea.
It was their last attempt.
They were about to give up.
What they found became the largest oil field ever discovered at sea
anywhere in the world.
Oh, my God.
So, this is a tanker coming in empty or full?
- This is an empty tanker coming in for loading crude.
- It's like a four-storey metal wall just moving in front.
It's colossal.
- Little bit away from the mooring lines.
- Over the last 50 years,
this small nation of farmers and fisherman
has sucked out trillions of pounds' worth of oil and gas
from under the North Sea.
They pump more of the stuff per head than even Saudi Arabia.
You live quite a double life, Roy.
- Ja... - One moment, you're with your sheep and the next...
Have we got enough? - Ja.
- I'm going to really mess this up, aren't I?
- I don't think so.
- In front of these burly bloody Norwegians.
Good afternoon.
Say when, sir.
- Whenever you're ready. - Yeah.
- Thank you. - He's got it.
- Yep. - Look at that.
The job is done.
- So now you can start to work in the oil business.
- They're loading this tanker with enough oil
to fuel more than one million cars with petrol -
all of it for export.
But at home, at least,
Norway's enthusiastically adopted green energy.
They have the highest number of electric cars
per head in the world -
and most of them have ditched their gas boilers
for electric heat pumps.
Just a little bit of a contradiction.
Hardly any of this oil is actually used here in Norway.
Norway sources almost all of its electricity
from cleaner, greener hydroelectric power -
thus absolving itself of any sort of direct consumer guilt.
They're a little bit like a drug pusher, really,
who refuses to use their own product.
But they will very happily sell it to almost anyone else.
With sanctions on Russia,
Norway's now the biggest supplier of gas to the UK and Germany.
It's a trade that has helped to make the 5.5 million Norwegians
among the richest people on the planet.
An hour down the coast is Bergen, an oil boom town,
but not like any I've ever seen.
It really looks like Diagon Alley from Harry Potter.
If you were expecting oil bling like Abu Dhabi or Houston,
or somewhere like that, think again.
Here, they spent a lot of their oil money restoring old Bergen.
Lovingly restoring it.
It's all very understated Scandinavian.
Of course, in many countries, discovering oil
doesn't always bring benefits for the people, the masses.
Often it fuels corruption, and even war -
or a pampered elite just fritter away the oil billions.
But to their credit, at least here even ordinary Norwegians
have shared in the oil bonanza.
Alf? - Yes!
- Hello, Alf. - Hello.
- I'm Simon.
- Hello, Simon. - It's lovely to see you.
I've got a slightly fractured finger,
so I'll go with that one. - Ja.
- Hello. - Welcome here.
- Thank you very much. Carolina? - Hello, Simon.
- Hi, Carolina. Simon. Yes, hello.
- Nice to meet you. - Nice to meet you, too.
- Well, come on board. - Yes.
- All right. Thank you.
Alf Roald Saetre and Carolina Saetre are local entrepreneurs.
Ah, straight into the cabin. - Yes. - Straight in.
- I definitely should not be here.
The lives of Norwegians - all of them -
have been transformed by oil.
Alf comes from a humble background - his family were oyster farmers -
and he's still obsessed with seafood.
Locals have given him a nickname.
Oyster Dundee, named after Crocodile Dundee?
- Yeah. But I've been working with oysters.
I still have a big knife also. - You have a big knife? - Yeah, yeah.
- I'm sure you do. - Yeah.
- Back in the 1970s, Alf started working
on some of the first oil rigs out on the Norwegian side
of the North Sea.
So you were a trained submarine pilot?
- Yes. - You trained in Edinburgh,
and that was to pilot the submersibles
that were servicing the oil rigs? - Servicing.
Yeah, and bringing divers down in the local submarines.
So we did various jobs for the oil industry.
- So you were there really during the birth of Norway's oil industry?
- Yes, we were pioneers.
It was a great time, actually.
Yeah, I really loved it.
- What's sort of the coldest temperature you would dive in?
- Around four degrees here.
- That's pretty dam chilly.
- This neoprene isolates quite a lot.
- Yeah. And good blood as well?
Good Viking spirit? - Yeah, Viking blood, you know?
- LAUGHTER
Now aged 72, these days Oyster Dundee
dives down for shellfish.
- OK. - Well, good luck and stay safe.
- Yeah.
- Are you happy with him diving?
- Oh... - Oh, you're making a face.
- It makes me nervous a little bit.
- Hello! - Hey, how was that?
- That was very nice.
"Very nice." - SIMON LAUGHS
Good.
- You can pull it up.
- Pull it up? All right. - Yeah.
See what we got.
- Oh, right. Quite the catch.
Wow!
There we are. - There we are. Back.
Really nice.
- Excellent.
- I got some really big ones.
So I go in with the knife and cut it.
And...
- It just pops open. - Yeah.
Normally they throw the gills away,
but actually there's a lot of taste in it.
So you can eat it, yeah.
And it's so good to eat, you know?
- But this bit of the scallop is the best, no?
- Yeah. - Thank you.
- When you eat the scallop, this is the muscle itself.
Mm! You can feel it works!
- Well, I'm admiring what it does for you.
- Yeah.
This is very healthy food.
And my father, he ate this all his life,
every day,
and he got so old that we had to kill him.
- LAUGHTER
Actually, why am I laughing at that?!
A shocking story.
- So it's so very, very, very healthy.
- This is the other problem in the sea now, isn't it?
- Ja. - Little bits of plastic floating around.
- I hate plastic in the water. - Oh, you're going in?
- Wahey!
- LAUGHTER
Well done, Alf! Well done!
That is how people should respond to it.
Well done.
Like many other Norwegians,
Alf earned decent money in the oil industry.
He invested his earnings and became a successful businessman.
Where are we going now, Alf?
- We are heading towards the little tiny island that nobody lives on.
It's only a restaurant, Cornelius restaurant.
- And this is your restaurant?
- Yes, it's my restaurant.
- OK.
Alf named his restaurant Cornelius
after his oyster-farming grandfather.
- Hello! - Hello, hello!
- Come along and have a look. - All right.
- There you see running water. - Yeah.
- So I keep my scallops and stuff... - Nice and fresh.
- It's nice, huh? - Yeah.
This is where you can see how well-off Norwegians are.
Private ferries often bring more than 200 guests a night.
- So you heard about me?
- Yes. - I told her. I told her.
- OK. - Very sexy guy out there.
- LAUGHTER
Diners can pay more than £150 a head -
and that's without wine from Alf's walk-in cellar.
What's the most expensive bottle of wine you've got here?
- This is the most expensive one.
It's actually £8,000.
- £8,000 bottle of wine!
There's few signs here of a cost-of-living crisis in Norway.
- Oi, oi, oi!
- What is this? Thank you.
- This is our bisque crab soup. - Ja.
- And this is the smoked salmon.
- Oh, that looks very special.
- Enjoy. - Thank you.
When you were a lad growing up,
this was not the Norwegian reality, was it?
- No, my mother, she knitted my clothes.
So it was... We didn't have any money
to spend on luxury things.
- And now look!
- And now look, yeah. It's quite a change.
So I think about it more or less every day, actually.
- What, your good luck?
- Yes, how lucky we are that we have been born here.
- To be born Norwegian -
that's winning a lottery, really, isn't it?
- It feels like it. Yeah.
- I think we're just in time.
Hiya.
I think this is right.
I was taking the overnight train to Norway's capital city, Oslo.
So, let's have a look at this.
Ooh!
It's a bit sort of prison-cell chic -
but not bad.
Didn't sleep too badly.
It's a little bit like being rocked in a cradle.
For many years, Norway had the second highest GDP
per capita in Europe - after tiny Luxembourg.
And all that money wasn't splashed out
on Lamborghinis and Prada handbags.
It went on wages,
state spending,
and into just about the biggest pot of dosh on the planet.
In the 1990s, Norway took the decision to save and invest
a huge chunk of their earnings from oil and gas
for the future.
They set up a giant national savings account -
a sovereign wealth fund, as they're called.
It's now the single largest in the world.
So here we are.
This looks just like any other corporate office, doesn't it?
But this is definitely not some paper wholesalers in Slough.
What goes on in here affects the lives
of millions of people around the world.
This is the headquarters of Norway's sovereign wealth fund.
The fund is a financial colossus.
It's one of the largest single stores of wealth ever assembled.
Maybe the biggest.
The fund owns global infrastructure,
ports, airports, chunks of major world cities,
and roughly 1.5% of all the stocks and shares listed
in the entire world.
Thank you.
The fund is worth the equivalent of nearly 25,000 tons of gold.
Look, online, there's a website
which shows the actual market value of the fund in real time.
It is a staggering sum.
So this is in Norwegian kroner,
but in pounds it's more than £1.2 trillion.
That is an almost unimaginable figure.
For me, the best way of understanding
how much a trillion is,
is to convert it into seconds.
So, rather than thinking of it in pounds,
think of it in seconds.
A million seconds is almost 12 days ago.
A billion seconds is more than 31 years ago.
But a trillion seconds is more than 31,000 years ago.
A trillion is a huge figure.
All right. Thank you.
I'd come to see the fund's chief of staff,
Trond Grande.
Trond? Hello, Simon Reeve.
Nice to see you. - Nice to meet you.
- I know you're very busy. - Absolutely.
- Can we come in? - Of course.
- Oh, fantastic.
And you've got a book here.
What is this? Pressure.
- Pressure. - "Lessons from the..."
- "..Psychology of Penalty Shoots."
- You're a man who deals with pressure that most of us cannot comprehend.
- Yes, but I think we all do, right?
And the point he tried make was, you know,
how can you prepare for the pressure?
- This is a colossal store of wealth.
- Of course, it's just a staggering amount of money.
But I mean, honestly, for us,
it's just another kind of three more zeros
or six more zeros, or nine more zeros. Right?
You become slightly kind of blind to the size of it.
- Mm.
The Norwegians spend less from the fund each year
than the amount it's increased by.
So it's just grown and grown.
So sensible and Scandinavian.
Can you imagine how good you have to be at delaying gratification
and thinking long-term when you've got an ice cream store
right outside your office?
How on earth do you cope with that?!
That is a source of temptation.
- It is.
- I think this says a lot about you.
- About restraint? - Yes!
- Well, we have to fill it quite often, right?
Some people tend... - Yeah.
- Especially now during summer.
Late afternoon, grab an ice cream and stay outside.
- Yeah, but look at your washboard stomach there.
You're clearly not eating all of these, are you?
- I'm leaving it to everybody else to eat, yeah.
- Look, this cannot... Trond, I'm sorry.
- Yeah. - I've just seen another...
This is brilliant. - This is... Yeah.
- Is this how decisions are taken?
Look at this. - Yeah.
- So, it has buy...
..sell, hold...
..or panic.
LAUGHTER
This is a decision-making cube...
- Absolutely essential to what we do, yeah.
- ..for anyone who trades in stocks and shares.
Look, what's it going to come up as?
- Panic. - Panic?! - Panic.
- LAUGHTER
Thank you very much.
So, who's actually rolling the dice here?
Where are we going now?
- Now we're going to the trading floor.
Oh, sorry. - OK. - Please.
So, this is essentially where the action happens.
- What's going on here?
Can you tell us anything?
What are you doing?
- Yeah, today is month end.
So, then, we have fundings or defundings.
- Which means buying and selling?
- Yes. - A lot.
- Yes.
- Define a lot.
- Yeah, right now it's 2.5 billion dollars.
LAUGHTER - You look remarkably calm...
..for somebody involved in such activity,
fuelled by Coca-Cola.
- I've done many times before. - Of course you have.
- We have a good system, so I know it's taken care of.
- Most Norwegian oil and gas wealth goes to the state.
Their fund is now large enough to support Norway's schools,
welfare and hospitals for generations to come.
Historically, Britain extracted more oil and gas
from its North Sea drilling area,
but much of the revenue went to companies.
Some argue it boosted our economy, others that we squandered it.
Either way, we never set money aside like the Norwegians.
As a Brit, I am left thinking what might have been.
It's lunchtime.
- Yeah. Need to grab something to eat.
- I feel a bit weird being out here with you.
I feel like... "This is Trond!
"This is Trond!"
- I'm not famous.
- But...almost, why not?
Because you hold...
Through the fund, you hold the future of everybody here.
Y-You...
It is true? - Yeah.
- The billions they've earned from oil and gas has given Norwegians
one of the world's highest standards of living...
After you.
..but, of course, pumping out all those fossil fuels
has contributed hugely to climate change.
What are you going to have?
I would love the prawn...
Shrimp sandwich, please.
So, do they make up for that with their Wealth Fund?
They do follow some ethical rules -
avoiding dodgy regimes and big tobacco -
but mostly it's run for pure profit.
Ultimately, the Norwegian government controls the fund,
and has instructed Trond to invest up to just 2%
in renewable energy.
Why so small?
- Well, it could be up to 2%.
- Mm.
- And we are now at 1...
Sorry, 0.2%.
Something like that. So there's a long way to go.
- So, you've got a tiny percentage of the fund at the moment
invested in... - At the moment.
- ..renewables, in sustainables. - Yeah, yeah.
- I suppose my worry, as an outsider,
looking at this incredible fund that you've built,
is still its investments...
I don't feel like it's aggressive enough as a national fund. - Mm.
- Aggressively investing in the future,
in renewables,
in green cement,
in developing green steel, for example,
which Norway could create.
There must be people saying,
"Trond and the fund should be investing more in such and such."
- No, absolutely. All the time. - A lot of pressure? - Yeah.
We're trying to keep this fund as apolitical
as possible in Norway. - Mm.
- So all we do is with a financial return in mind.
- Not for ethical reasons? - No.
But it wouldn't be right for us, as the managers of the fund,
under the mandate that we're given,
to do anything else than what we're told to do.
So that aggressiveness,
aggressiveness or change of direction or pressure,
needs to come from the ultimate owners of the fund.
- Norway. - Norway. The people.
Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely.
- And there's not overwhelming pressure here to change direction.
Norwegian politicians say they extract oil more cleanly
than other countries,
and their fossil fuels allow Europe to reduce reliance on states
like Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Critics say Norway's too dependent on the fossil fuel economy,
that Norwegians are sitting rather too happily
on their pile of oil money,
are becoming less entrepreneurial than other Scandis
and aren't really facing-up to their national role in climate change.
So not everyone here supports the oil economy
and the policies behind it.
I met up with musician and campaigner Bente Lorentzen.
- I think the oil industry has done a very, very good job
in sort of selling a story to the Norwegian people
about the oil adventure
and how it suddenly turned our entire society
into a very wealthy one.
But there's a huge part of the story that's left out.
- Which is? - Obviously a big part of the story that's left out
is the environmental impact.
- Bente was taking me to her home village in northern Norway,
where she's been fighting a battle against the oil industry.
It was a journey of around 700 miles by rail and sea,
into the Arctic Circle
and up to a remote corner of the country.
Bente grew up here,
in the idyllic fishing village of Henningsvaer.
Permission to come on. - Hi!
- She arranged for her old friend, Captain Havard,
to take us out in his fishing boat.
- OK. - Hi.
Thank you. I'm looking forward to this.
Oh, come on!
Ha!
I think Norway has a solid claim
to be the most beautiful country in the world.
I mean, look at it!
I do not say that lightly,
but this really does it for me.
Everywhere I'm looking in the distance,
there are the misty mountains.
It gets me here.
On the edge of the Arctic Ocean,
this is one of the world's most important fish spawning areas.
The Lofoten Islands attract spectacular wildlife -
including orcas, sperm whales, seals, otters,
kittiwakes and puffins.
Havard decided introductions were in order with some of the locals.
- Ah, it's coming. - It's coming.
No!
Wow! - What?!
- Incoming!
- Oh, wow! - Oh, my gosh!
I really felt that in my heart.
Boom! And it's off!
- Yeah.
To feed the kids.
- To feed the kids. - Yeah.
They call this a particularly vulnerable
and valuable area.
Because if you look at the Lofoten Islands as a whole... - Yeah.
- ..it's kind of like a small arm sticking into the deep ocean.
And it creates this magnificent gathering of plankton and food
for the seabirds and the fish,
which again attracts whales.
Some of the whales that we have here,
they swim from the west coast of Africa
to come right here to get their favourite food.
- That's quite a privilege and responsibility, isn't it?
- Yeah.
- Given that the Norwegians have already earned a few bob
from the fossil fuel industry,
you might think they'd try to keep the Lofotens,
home to some of Europe's largest seabird colonies, pristine.
But no.
- For years and years and years,
they tried to open this area for exploration
and oil and gas activity.
This area in particular,
we're talking of a concentration of wildlife
that's unique in the world.
If an oil spill would happen in this area,
it would take less than 24 hours for the oil to reach shore.
- So you're talking about the risk of disruption
as they explore for oil,
and potentially destruction if something goes wrong?
- Yeah. - Which, of course, it has done numerous times around the world.
- Yeah.
- There could be up to three billion barrels of oil
under the seabed here -
and, of course, oil-dependent economies want to buy that,
to run cars and generate electricity,
but a group of locals said no.
Bente helped found the People's Action for an Oil-free Lofoten,
a grass-roots group.
More than 7,000 people joined.
Bente was one of the leaders of a campaign
to stop the oil and gas industry coming to these islands.
And what's incredible is they won.
Drilling's been stopped here,
but Norway's still one of the top global oil and gas producers,
pumping out almost two million barrels of oil every day.
Well, campaigners here won that battle,
but Norway been described as the most aggressive
explorer for new oil and gas fields in Europe.
It's awarded hundreds of exploration licenses over the last decade -
and just earlier this year,
Norway became the first country in the world
to allow commercial mining of the seabed,
even though campaigners and experts have warned
that could be catastrophic for marine life.
One day, Norway's oil will run out,
but they do have another great resource -
the sea.
Orca!
Oh, my God!
Right in front of us!
I have never been so close!
One, two, three, four, five.
Six maybe.
Seven!
They came up, they had a play, and they went back down.
Norway is second only to Canada
for the longest coastline on the planet.
So, for centuries, the Norwegians have used
the bounty of the ocean.
The deep, cold waters off the coast of Norway
have always offered amazing fishing.
But the small communities along the coast,
over decades, transformed themselves from fishermen to fish farmers.
Dotted along Norway's coast
and through many of its fjords are now huge fish pens,
collectively holding - in particular -
hundreds of millions of farmed Atlantic salmon.
Norway now produces half of all the world's farmed salmon.
It's a huge business,
worth almost £10 billion a year.
The industry's come in for serious criticism -
especially about pollution.
In places, the concentration of fish poo
and chemicals used to treat the salmon
have been devastating for the environment.
It's a type of factory farming.
And now they've supersized their operations.
This is Havfarm 1.
The world's largest offshore fish farm.
Oh, my goodness.
Inge, it's absolutely enormous!
- Yes. - Look at the length of this!
- It's 385 metres.
It's 35,000 tonnes of steel.
And the depth is 50 metres depth.
- Nearly as long as an aircraft carrier.
- I think it's 50, 60 metres longer
than the biggest aircraft carrier, actually.
- Inge Berg is a billionaire -
one of the godfathers of Norwegian fish farming.
He had this built in China.
It's thought to be the largest structure ever transported
on a heavy lift vessel.
Inge claims it's improved or resolved
many of the problems with the fish farm industry.
- When it's bad weather, it's not so easy - like this today.
- Yeah, I can imagine.
- Six cages like this.
- And I can see some of the fish jumping here. - Yeah.
- How many fish have you got here?
- Today, I think there are 2.2 million in total.
- 2.2 million fish?!
- In total, yeah.
In the whole... Yeah.
- That is staggering.
Why didn't you want to be in a fjord?
Why did you want to be offshore?
- In the fjord, it's become more controversial to be there.
Here, you see, there is nothing around us,
so we don't see any environmental footprint
of this production so far.
- Inge says, by positioning this out at sea,
the tons of poo from the fish will be diluted and washed away -
rather than settling on the floor of a fjord,
damaging the marine environment and wild salmon populations.
Apparently it's time for feeding.
Just a handful of people work here.
Feeding and pretty much everything is automated and high-tech.
Instead of using chemicals to tackle another problem
with farmed salmon, they use lasers.
So, this is called a Stingray. - Yeah.
- And this is to combat a major problem
that farmed salmon have, isn't it?
Which is that they get lice - salmon lice - on them? - Yeah.
We are using this to remove the salmon lice.
- How much does a laser unit to zap salmon lice cost?
- Very expensive.
- LAUGHTER
Yeah, I can imagine.
It's thought 90% of the planet's wild fish stocks are over-fished.
Over the last century, life in our oceans
has taken an absolute hammering.
The fish farm industry claims it's better for our oceans
if we eat farmed fish rather than wild fish.
The industry's grown dramatically, massively.
More than half of all fish and shellfish
consumed by humans is now farmed.
We headed back to land to see where they zap salmon lice with lasers.
- So, here we have the operation centre.
- Goodness me.
- We are measuring everything
and we are having control of the water quality
and temperature and everything.
- And I can see on the screen here - there's a zap, basically.
- Yes, the red one is the pulses.
- Right. - It's detecting the lice on the fish
and shooting it.
- Does it dislodge the lice? Or it kills the lice?
- It kills it.
Grills it.
- Grills it. - Yes.
- Inge claims this is one of the most efficient methods
of meat production -
with low inputs of feed.
How does the conversion of feed to fish compare with other...
- Yeah, you can see here. - ..farm products?
- We are one kilo feed to produce one kilo fish.
When you see a chicken,
it's close to two kilo feed to produce one kilo of chicken.
And I think pork is close to three kilo feed
to produce one kilo pork.
- To balance sustainability with feeding
all the people who want to eat animal protein,
that ratio matters.
All right, I'm ready to go in.
The salmon are killed by electrocution
and then processed.
This is mechanical fish gutting.
I think I'm going to have nightmares about this.
I feel torn seeing this.
I may well have eaten salmon
that's come through this factory.
It's definitely a better form of industrial fish production
than in may other fish farms.
But I find it quite hard to witness
this sort of industrialisation of farming, of fishing.
It's hard to stomach.
The industry argues that, done as cleanly and humanely as possible,
fish farming can help protect wild stocks of fish
from being further decimated.
But all forms of fish farming are controversial
for welfare and environmental reasons.
The long-term impact of this new factory is not yet known.
In midsummer,
in the far north of Scandinavia,
the days are endless.
Oh, this is weird.
So, it's now nearly 11:20 on a Sunday night...
..and the sun is out.
Because this is the land of the midnight sun.
And I've got to tell you, it's a bit odd.
It's doing my head in.
Even with the sun up at night,
Scandinavia still feels familiar for a Brit.
Then I was driving into a small town,
heading towards a bed for the night,
when I spotted something that I think
illustrates a key difference.
Oh, my goodness.
Oh, we've got to see this.
Look at this!
All of these flowers have been left out here overnight.
It's actually even more astonishing.
So, this is...
This is like an honesty shop.
They've just left all of this open
and are trusting people to pay using a QR code here,
or you can give this code on an app
to buy what's here.
They've just left this!
Flowers, chocolates, vases.
SIMON GASPS
Alcohol-free, but still.
As a Brit, I was immediately thinking how,
in most towns elsewhere,
this place would be robbed or vandalised.
But Scandinavia is special.
There's stock out here and in there
worth thousands of pounds.
This for me, I think, is one of the greatest,
clearest examples I've seen
of something that is central to the success of modern Scandinavia,
and that is trust.
They have trust in their community,
in their government to a large extent,
and in each other.
But they've got it.
And I think we've lost it.
It was time for me to leave Norway
and its spectacular Lofoten Islands.
I travelled across the North Atlantic
to visit another branch of the Scandi family.
Iceland is a volcanic outcrop of fire and ice -
not even the size of England.
And with a tiny population - about the same as Leicester.
Geographically, this isn't strictly part of Scandinavia,
but the links are strong.
Genetically speaking,
Iceland is definitely Scandinavian.
It was largely created by, let's be honest,
outlaws from western Norway -
and they still speak a version of Old Norse.
- So I'm an outlaw now?
- Yeah, are people going to take offence at that?
- SIMON LAUGHS - No, we're partially insane.
- Cross the Atlantic and then live on a volcanic island with no food.
- Yes, that doesn't sound like the wisest move by your ancestors.
Helga Torfadottir is going to be my guide in Iceland,
a place quite unlike anywhere I've ever been.
So, what is...? What is this?
- This is the newest addition to Iceland.
- This is all new lava flow around us? - Yeah.
Yeah. - Wow.
- It's been raining, but the lava's still hot.
So, when the water hits the lava flow,
it just turns into steam.
- Can we stop just up here? Is that possible?
That is an astonishing sight.
As well as being one of those partially insane Icelanders,
Helga's a volcanologist.
So this is your world?
- This is my world.
And my playground, actually - my office.
- I think, for most of us on the planet,
we take stability... really, for granted.
But not here.
- Well, we have to live with it and work with it somehow.
Like, nature is in charge
and we just learn as we go, I guess.
- This cooling lava's from the Sundhnukur volcano -
a fissure eruption destroying everything in its path.
- We're going to go into the town of Grindavik.
- Is it safe to go in there?
- Well, not really.
The future of Grindavik is a bit unsure.
- More than 3,000 people living in Grindavik
were evacuated before the volcano erupted.
- Oh, do not want to drive here.
- Earthquakes from the eruption opened up deep chasms beneath the town.
- The town is sort of, like, masking a little bit
what you should be seeing naturally below.
- Right.
It's not just Grindavik.
Even the area around the capital city, Reykjavik,
is under threat from nearby volcanoes and earthquakes.
- The whole island is a volcanic island
and there's threats everywhere,
depending on how you look at it.
Our kind of motto in life here in Iceland
is "thetta reddast" -
which means it will work itself out somehow.
But people also think,
"Well, not in my lifetime.
"Of course we're not going to have a catastrophe in my lifetime."
- Mm. - But it has to land on someone's lifetime, and we are that lifetime.
- Iceland's volcanoes aren't just a threat to people who live here.
In 2010, you might remember,
an ash cloud from an eruption drifted across Europe,
shut down airspace and grounded thousands of flights -
the largest air-traffic shut-down since World War II.
Yet, in historical terms, that was just a baby.
So we just stopped by the side of this track
to have a look at this colossal lava field here.
So, this is the lava
from one of the largest eruptions in recorded history.
The Laki eruption of the early 1780s.
So, under here, there is stone...
..from lava, basically,
and then on top of that has grown quite a delicate moss.
That was an eruption that had enormous consequences
for Iceland, but also for the world as well.
So much debris was spewed out during the eruption,
into the atmosphere, that there was a haze
that could be seen in the sky from Europe
to China and Japan.
It affected crop harvests.
It caused changes to weather systems.
It's even thought to have created poor harvests in Europe
which led quite directly
to the hunger and the famine
which was one of the main drivers behind the French Revolution.
So don't imagine that events that happen far away
can't have extraordinary consequences.
So, big questions for volcanologists like Helga
are which one's next?
And how bad could it be?
To find out, she took me off-road.
We headed up onto Myrdalsjokull - one of Iceland's 269 glaciers.
It is so stark up here.
Life is reduced down to such basic elements.
Black and white.
Glaciers cover around 10% of Iceland.
Due to climate change, many glaciers have retreated exceptionally fast
over the last two decades.
It's feared they could lose half their volume
by the end of the century.
We're taking it pretty slowly just because this is a fragile surface.
There are crevasses -
and we do not want to fall into one.
We're now really up on top of the glacier.
You feel quite exposed up here.
No, I did not see a crevasse!
This glacier ice cap is enormous -
200 square miles,
with an average depth of 200m thick.
But what's happening below the ice is what Helga wanted to show me.
So, just recently here...
..they made quite an amazing discovery.
An ice cave!
- Continue forwards.
- Underneath millions of tons of ice,
this cave shows what lies further beneath our feet.
What are you seeing there? - This is...
..ash.
- Ash?
From a volcanic eruption?
- Yes, from a volcanic eruption
from Katla volcano,
which is just below us here.
- There's a volcano, what, underneath us?
Over there? Where?
- Basically underneath us, yes. We're within Katla now.
- Which has erupted before?
- Last eruption was in 1918.
That was a big explosive eruption.
And this is the ash from that.
- So, this ice contains secrets, then?
- A lot of secrets.
- Above us, the glacier's like a heavy lid
sitting on a pressure cooker below us -
the whopping Katla volcano.
- The rate we're melting the glacier,
it will release the pressure on Katla.
And if Katla has a shallow magma store
that technically is ready to erupt,
you just need to set it off by a little pressure release -
similar to opening a soda bottle, you see the bubbles rise,
that you're relieving pressure from the soda.
That's a very similar thing here.
- Just so I understand it -
this glacier is almost like a giant ice cap...
- Yes. - ..on top of the Katla volcano?
And its enormous weight -
billions of tons of frozen water -
that compresses the tectonic plate, no less, underneath it. - The crust.
- The crust of planet Earth. - Yeah.
- As that melts away,
it makes a volcanic eruption more likely and more powerful?
- More likely - not necessarily more powerful.
It's a rapid melting,
which then results in a rapid movement of the crust.
I don't think we should spend any more time here. - After you.
- Thanks.
- Need to get out of here.
So, Helga's not happy with us being through here
because it's sunny outside
and that can mean there's an increased melt...
..and as a result, you can get a flash flood
coming through these caves,
and obviously that could be disastrous.
All right, well, we made it out here.
It's a little bit safer here,
but still not guaranteed safety.
The Katla volcano beneath us is huge,
with a caldera roughly the size of Paris.
This has really surprised me.
The melting of Earth's glaciers
can seem like a very distant story and problem -
but here we have a situation where climate change
is melting a glacier that could then unleash destructive forces
that could directly impact on tens or hundreds of millions
of people around the world.
Katla's next eruption could be catastrophic,
pumping out a vast ash cloud high into the atmosphere,
polluting air with volcanic gasses,
grounding flights
and destroying harvests across Europe and North America.
Scientists expect the heat to flash-melt the ice cap above,
discharging flood waters at a greater flow rate
than that of the Amazon River.
Living on a pressure cooker isn't all bad
for the people of Iceland.
They've tapped the unstable geology and magma below ground
to help provide masses of heat for homes and power.
Iceland's a renewable energy superpower,
generating so much electricity
they've set-up aluminium smelters and host data centres -
which probably store some of your photos
in those mysterious clouds.
And now they're using renewable power
to remove some of the carbon dioxide, CO2,
we've all been pumping into the atmosphere -
a major cause of climate change.
Oh, my goodness! - Yeah.
- Wow.
Bergur Sigfusson is a geologist for a firm called Carbfix.
They're into what's called carbon capture.
So, Bergur, what is this?
- These are the collector containers.
They are sucking air into these containers.
Inside them, they have a filter
that selectively binds CO2 from the air.
And then what comes out of the filter
is just air without CO2.
- Since the Industrial Revolution,
we've been burning fossil fuels, coal,
cutting down our forests,
we've been pumping carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere, haven't we? - Yeah, yeah.
- What's being done here is essentially
sucking the carbon out of the air? - Yes.
What comes out here is essentially air
with pre-industrial CO2 concentrations.
- So we're breathing some of the purest air on the planet?
- Yeah, this is something that the Earth hasn't seen
for a few hundred years.
- I'm filling my lungs. - Yeah.
But then... - It does taste good.
- Doesn't it? - It does.
There's concern about whether carbon capture is remotely viable,
or that it might become a convenient excuse to carry on polluting -
but there's a lot of money in it.
Companies and countries are trying to make it work.
- Voila. - Voila, yeah.
Here, they think they've cracked one of the major problems
with carbon capture -
where to safely store the carbon dioxide, or CO2.
What have we got here?
LAUGHTER
- So, earlier, the CO2 was captured from the air.
The CO2 was then compressed into a column,
and the CO2 was dissolved in water.
So, we have like a machine that creates soda stream.
Just like the soda stream you drink.
- Yeah, so fizzy water.
- Fizzy water. Three times more CO2
than in the fizzy water that you buy in the supermarket.
- Right. - And this steel pipe here... - BERGUR KNOCKS
- ..it goes all the way down to 350 metres.
And here we see an example of basalt.
- Let's see this. So this...
Can I hold it?
When you look at it, it looks like Swiss cheese, doesn't it? - Yes.
And then the water goes into these bubbles,
into the formation, and then you end up with something similar to this.
- Wow! - So, here, these white specks here.
- Yes? - This is carbonate.
And this is what will happen with time.
- This is the real magic, I think, isn't it?
You're turning fizzy water into rock.
- Yes. We are doing this in many locations
with very good success,
and this is what we're going to continue to do.
Make more white rocks.
- LAUGHTER
By 2030, carbon capture firms hope - optimistically -
to be removing perhaps a few hundred million tons of CO2 per year.
It's promising, but let's be realistic.
That's still less than 1% of today's emissions.
I think this is great. I do.
But this is still really small scale.
This is like trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon.
We have to reduce and stop burning fossil fuels
that our lives and industrialised economies
have depended upon now for generations.
It's tough, but we can do it!
Next time, on the final leg of my journey...
Splash down!
- Off we go!
- ..I'm in Sweden and Denmark...
Oh, my goodness! Look at that!
Pretty raunchy.
..discovering another side of Scandinavia.
You're wearing these in urban Sweden?
- Yes.
I'm on the rugged edge of Europe.
Visiting five Nordic countries.
It's incredible, it's incredible.
Travelling through glorious forests...
..and spectacular fjords.
I think Norway has a solid claim
to be the most beautiful country in the world.
I mean, look at it!
Wow, dogs pulling a car!
It's more than half a million square miles of extremes.
This is low, this is low!
- This is my life.
- Somebody's holding on to me, yeah?
- Now breathe, breathe.
- Off we go.
- I'm hoping to understand
how they've built some of the happiest societies on the planet.
Hey, guys! - Morning.
- Good morning!
And who have we got here?
What...?
LAUGHTER
This is the most traditional Danish lunch I have seen. - Yes.
- And why they now feel
they're in the firing line.
SantaPark is also a nuclear bunker? - Yes, very much so.
- They are preparing to defend Finland.
- GUNFIRE
Bloody hell.
You're wearing these in urban Sweden? - Yes.
- There's another side to Scandinavia.
- Ready to fire!
- ECHOING BLAST
On this final leg of my Scandinavian journey,
I'm travelling from southern Sweden into Denmark.
Two thirds of Sweden is covered in trees, nearly 90 billion of them,
and a population of just over ten million people.
Swedes love a cabin in the woods.
Not bad, eh?
I think, more than anywhere, Sweden really defines Scandinavia.
Tradition, modern design, gender equality,
ABBA, and flat-pack furniture.
Half of Swedes have access to a holiday home like a simple
cabin by a lake or deep in the forest.
Nothing fancy.
Just somewhere wholesome to get away.
Where they can eat their meatballs, light some candles,
and get nude in a sauna.
So Swedish.
What do you mean I'm going for cliches?
MUSIC: SOS by ABBA
- # So when you're near me
# Darling, can't you hear me?
# SOS. #
- For a generation, Swedes have done incredibly well.
- # The love you gave me
# Nothing else can save me
# SOS. #
- They've excelled in rankings of the healthiest, wealthiest,
happiest people on Earth.
In many ways, since the 1960s, Sweden has been the
poster child for Scandi success.
And those famous Scandinavian liberal values.
But of course, that's not the whole story.
All right, here we are.
- # How can I carry on? #
- Ready to fire!
- Those lovely liberal Swedes are also one of the world's
leading arms exporters.
COMMANDS IN SWEDISH
ECHOING BLAST
Bloody hell.
ALARMS BLARE
There are car alarms going off down there.
That is much more than a shock.
It's through your whole body, and in the entire area.
It's, it's slightly seismic.
Swedish arms company Bofors has a 40-square-mile weapons
testing facility, one of the largest in Europe.
The neutral Swedes avoided - some would say dodged -
fighting in both World Wars.
But they now make and export more weapons per head of population
than any country other than Russia and Israel.
- Five, four, three, two, one.
Fire!
- BLAST
They're conducting hundreds and hundreds of tests here every
year now, as the Swedish military and Scandinavia enters a new era.
Many Scandinavians used to think they live in a safe neighbourhood.
But after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, everything changed.
Many now think it poses a direct threat to Scandinavia as well.
Sweden abandoned neutrality, joined the NATO military alliance,
and ramped up weapons production even more.
For Colonel Stefan Krol, business at the Bofors test centre is booming.
- The defence industry all over Europe goes full speed ahead now.
They're building new factories, building new production lines,
going 24/7.
And it's all due to the war in Europe, ongoing.
- There's almost been a handbrake turn
and funding has increased dramatically.
- Yes, in a way, it's dramatic and it's a, it's a change of mindset.
The threat levels have risen and it's a huge demand of ammunition
right now that hasn't been there since the Second World War.
- Wartime production mode?
Is that what we're seeing?
- In some way, yes.
- The Swedes were neutral for decades and decades.
And as a result,
they didn't feel like they could rely on anyone for their defence.
They built up their own defence industry.
There is really no other country of comparable size, of comparable
population that can produce its own fighter jets and submarines.
They can do that in Sweden.
The Swedes make some of the
most advanced weapons systems in the world.
In one naval exercise, a stealthy Swedish submarine even sank
a US aircraft carrier.
This is gorgeous.
There's much about this region we don't always recognise.
As I saw in Finland, there's a steeliness.
They're also practical, competent and innovative.
I headed to Stockholm, the capital, to find
out more about what makes them tick.
So, I'm travelling into the centre of Stockholm.
And I'm getting a lift.
Hello, Maria.
- Welcome. - Is it OK to come on? - Yes. - Thank you.
It's not just a handshake, but...
Yeah. Oh...! Perfect. - OK. - Thank you!
This isn't just a fast boat.
It's a boat that flies.
This beauty's the Candela electric hydrofoil.
I'm sure you'll see it in a Bond film at some point.
It is so smooth as to be quite unnerving.
You don't really realise the speed that you're doing
until you look around.
This battery-powered boat leaves virtually no wake
and uses a fraction of the energy of other speedboats.
They're also hoping to use the technology for local ferries.
A speedboat like this can be yours for just a few 100,000...
Splashdown.
We've just landed - right in the middle of Stockholm.
This is the way to arrive.
I might insist on this in the future.
Thank you so much, Maria.
- Thank you. - Thank you very much indeed.
What an amazing way to arrive.
Wah!
Central Stockholm.
Thank you, Maria.
Stockholm's often described as the most beautiful
city in Scandinavia - admittedly mainly by Swedes.
Like much of Scandinavia, it's well-kept, charming,
with functioning public transport.
Bit boring?
Locals certainly seem very content.
Sweden and its neighbours always top the international
league tables for happiness.
So how on earth do they do it?
I wanted someone to explain,
so I headed to meet a man described as looking like a hipster Jesus.
- Hey, Simon, right?
- Micael Dahlen
is a professor at the renowned Stockholm School of Economics
So, big question -
what is, it's been called the Nordic model.
- Yeah. - The Scandinavian way of running an economy.
How would you explain that?
- Well, I think I'd use two words - welfare economy.
We want everybody to have equal opportunity.
We have free health care, free education,
free virtually everything.
But we also want everybody to contribute.
We're all in it together.
- This is key.
You get a lot as a Swede, and welfare benefits are generous.
But, people are also expected to play their part.
- Please mind the brakes.
- Please mind the brakes, OK.
The public are expected to work
and pay their taxes - to be productive members of society.
Not stay on benefits.
- Off we go.
- Micael's a professor of Economics and Wellbeing, Welfare
and Happiness.
He's ranked number two in the world in his field.
And he wanted to show me how Swedes are all in it together...
Tell me about your tattoos, by the way.
You've got some pretty distinctive markings.
- Yeah, those are all notes to self.
If I get 70%, it's not perfect.
It's never the best. But it's,
it's good enough. - Do something to 70%?
- You never give 100% cos then you will burn out.
You'll have performance anxiety that everything needs to be perfect.
- What is the eight signifying?
- So, the eight is the number of seconds I need to give myself
before I react to something.
I did the maths and eight is enough.
- You did the maths? - I always do the maths.
I can't help myself. - You're an economics professor!
- Exactly. - Of course you did the maths.
Well, the traffic lights have changed. - Oh, wonderful.
- There you go -
Micael says give it 70%.
Economics is a hot topic here in Scandinavia,
partly because tax rates are among the highest in the world.
- You're doing beautifully.
- Yeah, I've got a foot down a lot.
But their disposable income - after they've paid taxes -
is actually really high because so much here is free - universities,
health care, some elderly care, and especially childcare.
By all accounts, this is a pretty good place to raise a child.
What's going on here?
- I'd say this is a dads' group.
Enjoying their coffee. Latte papas.
- Latte papas. - Hey, guys.
- Good morning. - Good morning.
- It's a toddlers' group.
And you all look very calm.
How much paternity leave do you get in Sweden?
- 480 days.
- 480 days? - Yeah.
- And is that total parental leave or that's paternity leave for dads?
- Total for both. - Total for both. - Yeah.
- And who pays the paternity leave?
- Well, the government. - Taxes. - Or taxes! - Yeah. We all do.
- I'm coming in, if that's OK.
I'll move slowly.
I feel this is not just accepted - it's enjoyed.
It's part of life.
Would you agree? Do you know this?
- I've been home for six months, but I can't see it affect me
negatively in any in any way.
It's natural.
- But it's also tactical by society, isn't it?
Because it's ensuring that women not just continue to provide
economically for the family, but also for the state as well.
- It would be super wasteful to take all the moms
that are super smart - we don't want to put them
off the market - they contribute so much to our economy and welfare.
- And of course, this being Sweden, I think
women take up a greater percentage of degrees than men, as well.
So they're the better-educated section of the workforce.
- Exactly. - So, if you do the maths
and I love doing the maths, for every month that a dad takes
paternal leave, the average increase in salary for the mother increases.
So, it's, it's pure mathematics and economics.
It's good for everyone.
- Almost as one, the dads have said,
"It's nap time.
"We've got to go."
They've got a schedule and they know what it is.
It's easy to start thinking everything's perfect here.
Of course it isn't.
Sweden has problems familiar in other Western countries -
an ageing population, faltering economic growth,
and beneath the surface, this country has some more-dramatic,
troubling fault lines.
I travelled south to the city of Malmo.
Just check, is this it?
John? - I suppose it's the BBC...
- I'm Simon. - Welcome, Simon.
- Nice to see you.
John Wallender runs an elite police unit.
Bloody hell, John
- This is our armed vehicle
and basically we use it in high-risk tasks.
This is the first police edition of this vehicle in the world.
Some military units use it as well.
- That is quite the beast. - Absolutely.
- The Swedish police are arming-up
to confront an extraordinary crimewave.
What's been happening here is completely staggering.
There have been hundreds of shootings.
Hand grenades have been thrown into buildings.
It's been described as low-intensity conflict.
The Prime Minister here has said Sweden has never known
anything like this.
Roughly ten years ago, violent crime began to rise.
Dramatically.
Deadly shootings among drug gangs, largely run by people
from immigrant backgrounds, have since more than tripled.
The gun murder rate in Stockholm is now roughly 30 times that of London.
Sweden has the highest gun-crime death rate in Europe,
after Montenegro and Albania.
And it's not just guns.
Here's a bit of a clue to what this squad does.
John is the head of one of Sweden's three bomb squads.
- Welcome.
- Oh, my God.
- We have gathered a whole lot of things during our missions.
This is what we're dealing with.
- You've got grenades here.
- The hand grenades are being used in the criminal conflicts.
It's absolutely lethal. - It's an astonishing situation. - Yeah.
And most of the hand grenades being thrown are being thrown by very
young boys and girls.
- What sort of age is very young?
- We're talking high school age.
14, 15 years old.
- Seriously? - Yeah.
Being used by the older criminals, giving them
assignments to, "OK, throw this grenade on this site."
- That is quite staggering.
- It's totally non-acceptable.
- Kids throwing hand grenades?
- Yeah.
Somewhere around 2018, we experienced a rapidly
increasing numbers of home-made bombs, hand grenades and so on.
Those were mostly home-made bombs, IEDs.
- IEDs, improvised explosive devices.
- Yeah. - This is a phrase we only normally hear about war zones.
- Yeah, I know.
- But this is what you're encountering.
- Yeah, absolutely.
This is one of the typical Thermos bombs.
- It's a Thermos flask?
- Yeah, just a common Thermos flask.
The criminals have stuffed them with dynamite.
And then you have a very potent IED.
- Gangs are using this in Sweden?
- Yeah. Around 100 a year.
In criminal context.
- A year?! - Yeah, a year.
Being used in urban areas where people are living.
- Two a week? - Yeah.
- That's astonishing.
Gang warfare has exploded here - fuelled by the rise in cocaine
use in Sweden and across Europe.
Gangs have taken advantage of liberal policies that
children shouldn't be arrested, and actively recruited them.
Police say there's now around 1,200 child foot soldiers, bombers,
and even contract killers in their early teens, working for the gangs.
So, they're giving me
a little bit of a sense of what it is to be in the squad.
The situation is out of control.
Bomb units can get four call outs a day.
- Now, let's go for the jacket.
- Oh, my God.
There's more?
- Front panel as well. - OK.
- There you go.
- FAN WHIRS
A fan has just started up?
- Yes. - It has built-in fans?
- It has built-in fans, a cooling system.
- So the hands are clear?
- The hands are the most unprotected.
If anything explodes, you'll live,
but you might lose your hands.
You need the feeling in your hands.
That's why we don't use gloves.
- Your guys are wearing these into situations in urban Sweden.
- Yes.
- INDISTINCT
Overall, many crime rates here are around the European average...
How on earth do you guys do this?
..but exploitation of children in crime
and gangland bombings, are among the worst in the developed world.
Not long after I visited, Sweden recorded 30 bombings in one month!
I mean, it feels like a situation Sweden has still not got
full control of.
- No, I think ten years ago, no-one of us could foresee that coming.
But today, it's our reality.
- How on earth has Sweden got to this?
SIREN WAILS
The land of ABBA is now top of all Western countries for IED bombings.
The rise in violence follows an increase in immigration.
Most of the perpetrators, as well as the victims,
come from immigrant communities.
It's caused many Swedes to question long-cherished liberal ideals.
Back in Stockholm, I arranged to meet someone who's witnessed
the violence first-hand.
There she is.
- Hello! - Hi, Faysa!
Do you want to come round?
26-year-old Faysa Idle is a poet who's written about her
life growing up in Sweden in a tricky neighbourhood.
Nice to meet you, too. Simon Reeve, hello.
- Hello.
- So, we're in the centre of Stockholm.
Does this feel like your Stockholm, your city?
- No, it doesn't.
It doesn't feel like home.
- So how do you feel when you come here?
- As a tourist.
- Really? An outsider?
- Yes. - That's not good.
- No, it's not.
That's why I write about it in, like,
it's two different countries in one country.
Like, this Sweden, and our Sweden.
- Faysa was born and raised here.
Her family were refugees from Somalia 31 years ago.
In recent decades, Swedes welcomed refugees from world conflicts.
More than 100,000 from the wars in the Balkans, and hundreds
of thousands from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, many young men.
Asylum immigration into Sweden has been roughly four times
the rate in other Western European countries.
Housing's been provided - but often far from city centres,
in estates where up to 90% of
residents are now from immigrant backgrounds.
So this is Rinkeby... - Yes. - ..and Tensta?
- Yes.
- Two areas of suburban Stockholm.
Locals long complained these estates are cut-off, hemmed-in by motorways.
They have high unemployment
and they've been engulfed in gang warfare.
- Let's go, Simon.
I grew up in this area.
I used to go to school. - Right.
- That's over there.
And especially this place.
We always come here to smoke cigarettes.
- What would you say are the main problems that your generation
faced growing up here?
- Poverty.
And our way to becoming a rich person is through crimes.
For us, that way was the only way.
So I think most of us don't want to do these crimes,
but we want to have the money. - Yeah.
- Most of them, if you ask them, why are you killing?
They will tell you it's for the money they, cos...
It's only for the money, to...
- And when you say killing, you really mean that?
- Yeah, I really mean it.
It's a part of life.
It's actually a daily routine.
Like, I know murderers and I know the victims.
- This is the important place.
- Yes.
- SHE LAUGHS
It's like she's been waiting for you.
- Hey!
- Faysa took me to meet her friend Lotta.
- I come here and I have a lot of stress and Lotta here,
she's like a therapist, you know?
So I speak to her about things.
And so it's not just a salon, you know?
- Total...
- You release your feelings as well.
- ..heart of the community. - Yes.
- It's quite difficult to comprehend what's been happening
here in Stockholm, but in Sweden...
..over the last ten, just under ten years, really, isn't it,
there's been a huge increase in the number of children who have
been joining gangs, who've been sucked into gang life?
Can you give us a sense of what's happened?
- When I was 15 years old, I lost my best friend at this gang war
that has been happening for ten years, for a decade.
And when Sweden didn't see it as a problem.
I see it as a crisis, you know, I see it as a very big crisis.
Like, they were so young.
Two people died. - That is absolutely a crisis.
That's terrible situation.
- These two people that died, the young people that died,
were two black people from the suburbs.
- So, Sweden, as a country, didn't recognise... - No.
- ..there was a crisis? - Maybe it was -
"Yeah, but this is not really a Swedish issue."
- Right.
- "So, it will not come to our places."
- "To our homes. We're safe."
- "So that's why we can wait on it."
And that has been like - it feels like a betrayal for us because...
- We've been living like this for years.
- Because you are Sweden. - Yeah.
- You are born in Sweden, right? - Yes.
- I'm born in Sweden. - I lost all my friends.
Like, I lost all my neighbours, you know?
But for them, it's like just the statistics of numbers.
- It has affected everybody. - Mm.
- Everybody is affected.
You know why? Because it's not a racial thing.
It's a human problem.
- Yeah, but the first,
but the first thing is they need to see us as humans.
- Yeah.
- Start with that.
- Start with that. Give me a hug.
Mwah. - Mwah.
- Thank you. - Yeah, thank you, too.
- Not everyone who feels excluded or ignored joins a gang.
Most migrants here live blameless lives, contributing to the
country that took them in.
There's debate here about why crime has exploded, but there's no
disputing huge numbers of migrant children have been
caught up in the drug wars - Faysa's lost friends and close family.
Is this an area you would come to when you were younger?
- Yes.
But I haven't been here
since 2018,
because my brother was found dead here.
- Do you feel able to tell us what happened?
- When I saw him that day laying in some white.
What is it called when you bury...?
- In a body bag?
- Yes, in a body bag.
In a body bag.
So I haven't been here since this.
Erm...
- You haven't been back?
- No, I haven't.
We're so many of us.
Like, I don't understand why he was the one.
Now he has four kids asking where there dad is,
and they cannot understand how their father, that is a taxi driver
studying to become a doctor...
You know, like I have done some things in my life...
Like, I wish they could take me, like, they didn't need to take him.
- I'm so sorry, Faysa.
SHE MOUTHS
Faysa's brother was one of many victims of drug violence.
Another of her brothers, a gang leader, is in prison.
Swedish police say there are more than 60,000 active or
connected gang members.
Many argue poverty's the main driver of crime in violence hot spots.
And the unemployment rate here for people born abroad is certainly
shocking - four times higher than for people born in Sweden,
the worst gap in the developed world.
But politicians from the right,
and even many liberal Swedes,
now place blame for the crimewave squarely on
mass immigration from what they've
called "culturally distant countries".
Faysa wanted me to meet her mother, Nasteho,
who was given asylum in Sweden more than 30 years ago.
Thank you so much, Mum.
Can you remember a point, Mum,
a time when you realised things were starting to go sour?
So do you remember going to the authorities in some way?
- It's so hard being a mum in this environment, cos you feel so much,
and it's so draining.
I am born in Sweden.
I've never been to Somalia in my life.
She's putting the blame on us,
like, "You guys should know better, like,
"you're not in your own country."
- Hundreds of thousands of migrants, asylum seekers,
and refugees have come to Sweden and to Scandinavia.
And I think there's been something of a sense here
and across the region that almost
just by being here people would become Scandinavian
and would enjoy the benefits of life as a Scandinavian.
But that is clearly not the case.
Now, we can debate whether there's been a failure to integrate,
but there has definitely been a failure of integration.
And the consequences are now being felt.
I left Sweden and headed south, across the Baltic Sea...
I'm just coming up to the bridge now, which takes me from Sweden
into Denmark, the last country on my journey around Scandinavia.
For full transparency, I should tell you my wife is half Danish,
and I've been to Denmark many times to see the family there.
It's a country that I feel I know pretty well
and one that I really love.
The Oresund road and rail crossing is something of an engineering
marvel - it's still the longest
cable-stayed, combined road and rail bridge - in the world,
for any bridge-spotters watching.
Built on time and to budget.
And it's crucial - because it helps link Sweden and the
Scandinavian Peninsula to Denmark, and the rest of Western Europe.
Denmark's the smallest country in Scandinavia -
but punches above its weight.
Danish companies control 15% of the world's shipping containers -
they're huge exporters of industrially-farmed bacon;
and the Danish firm that makes the weight-loss drug Ozempic is
now one of the biggest pharmaceutical
companies on Earth.
The Danes are a straightforward bunch.
Practical. Unshockable.
Oh, my goodness, look at that.
Pretty raunchy!
That's the thing about the Scandis.
They can have this super neat, perfectly formed little community,
and a couple copulating in the main square!
They'd be like, "Stop making a fuss, Simon.
"It's just a lovely statue showing the beautiful act of love."
I've reached the west coast of Denmark, next to the sea.
And the wind blows strong here.
A lot of wind turbines.
Denmark is a global leader in wind energy.
It generates around 60% of their electricity,
and they export the technology around the world.
Many of Britain's offshore wind farms are built
and operated by Danish companies.
Let's go and take a closer look.
The company that built this huge wind turbine allowed me to go up it
while it was stopped for maintenance.
This at the moment,
holds the title for being the most powerful wind turbine in the world.
And that means it's also one the biggest and tallest.
From the ground to the top tip of a blade,
this wind turbine is almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower.
Oh, my good Lord.
Not ideal for those with vertigo!
Oh, my!
Oh, my good... I really can't.
Oh, I must...!
Oh, my...!
This is utterly epic.
To give you a sense of how big this turbine is,
look at these ones over here.
These turbines, they are not baby turbines,
those are normal wind turbines and we're looking down on them.
This single wind turbine powers around 20,000 homes.
20,000!
There was, apparently,
not a single planning objection from locals to this massive turbine.
Yes, of course I'm pleased to be on the ground!
Contrast that with the UK, where we can't erect a shed without
complaints escalating to the Supreme Court.
Because here locals were involved - Danes pioneered community
groups that OWN many turbines and wind farms.
Danish universities, governments,
and firms have worked together to develop wind tech.
People trust scientists and politicians,
so there's fewer objections and delays.
Right, we're here.
And right now,
the Danes are at the cutting edge, taking wind power up a notch more.
Knock, knock.
I went to see a Danish inventor -
one of the original wind turbine designers.
His name's Henrik Stiesdal.
Henrik? - Hi, there. Yes.
- We're meeting you in your secret lab?
- Yes.
You need to close your eyes when we speak here.
- Oh, do you? You've got the glasses on.
- You need the glasses. - I need glasses as well?
- Yes. - OK, I'll get them on.
- Yes. - Is that because things go boom here?
HE CHUCKLES
- That's the price of being, having fun in the lab.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
And we need to...
- We're with somebody really special here.
Just recently, he jointly won an award that is often
described as being the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for engineering.
Henrik is obsessed with clean energy.
In his lab he's searching for one of the holy grails - how to use
electricity from wind to make hydrogen - a clean fuel with
enough oomph to power planes, ships and lorries.
But he's also still inventing wind turbines - new, and bigger.
So, this is just one section for a mast.
- For a small wind turbine.
- A small one? - A small one.
- Henrik jokes his only real qualification is as a
ski instructor - he didn't finish university.
But in the 1970s, Henrik designed
one of the first modern wind turbines.
His inventions have since led to about a thousand patents.
He was in charge of setting up the world's very first offshore
wind farm.
- These are for offshore turbines
and they are much bigger than onshore turbines.
These are some of the largest sections that are built here.
- Out at sea, the wind blows stronger and more consistently.
With current technology, offshore wind farms need to
be in shallow water.
That limits where we can put them, and how much power we can generate.
It's a problem Henrik's trying to solve.
- In very large parts of the world, you can't do offshore wind
because the water gets to be too deep.
Too deep means more than 60m.
We want to become really global, we need to have structures that
can float so that you can go to much deeper waters.
And that's what we are working on here in this company.
- Floating wind turbines? - Yes.
We can produce ten times the power needs of the world with
a floating offshore wind.
Even if we had no solar,
no land-based wind, no nuclear, no nothing.
The resource is just huge.
- Henrik, ten times?
Ten times? - Yes.
So, these are parts that make up a floating offshore
wind tower foundation.
What we have here is this centre column.
- This is the floating structure... - Yes.
- ..on which a wind turbine would sit? - Yes.
I don't think we'll put them all on, but here goes one,
for instance, that will fit there.
- So, this - you've just swiftly created using your LEGO, as it
were, appropriately.
So, what of that, is this?
- So the upper part here from that little line there,
the LEGO brick is this one here.
- But look at the size of this.
This piece here in this structure is just this?!
- Yes. - Henrik, you think big?
- But our problem is big.
It needs a scale.
- How confident are you this will work?
- Oh, we are very confident.
It would be the biggest factory-made pieces of equipment
in the world, I think.
- There must be lots of competition to create this.
- Yeah, but in actual fact, the goal of our company is not money-making.
The goal of our company is impact on the fight against climate change.
We hope that can be an inspiration for the world,
so to speak.
- Wind power has limitations, and critics, but around the world
it's already revolutionised the way we generate electricity.
The Danes have profited by innovating, and working together.
They're leading the way.
I need to get a ferry.
I'm heading towards the end of my journey through Scandinavia
and I'm struck by the feeling, more than ever,
how much of our news, our media, and our culture
focuses, in the UK, on what's going on in the United States.
We have much more in common, in so many ways,
with this part of the world, than the USA.
I don't think we know enough about the Scandis and Scandinavia,
but things are going on here that really matter.
My last stop was the Danish capital - Copenhagen.
Even by the standards of Scandinavia, Denmark stands out.
Danes top global surveys of happiness and life satisfaction.
They pay high taxes but get generous welfare, free health care,
subsidised childcare, free education,
including free university.
They're wealthy, one of the most equal societies on Earth.
What's the secret?
As I walked the pleasant streets of Copenhagen, I came across a clue.
Sh, come on...
Look, that is a little toddler
having a sleep outside, in a pram,
in a public area with lots of flats around.
Hiya. - Hello. - Have you just left your child out to have a little nap?
- Yeah.
- It's a bit unusual, what you've just done, from our perspective.
- Yeah, well I live right in there, so I leave her there to sleep,
and then I can hear her, we have a little monitor,
so when she wakes up, I just go out.
- I think a Danish mother in New York, was leaving her child outside,
she was arrested, wasn't she? - She was arrested.
- That suggests - only do that in Denmark.
- Probably a good idea, yeah.
- You're a more-trusting people, aren't you?
- I think if you give people trust, they will also show you that they
are worthy of trust, right, in a way?
Have a good day. - All right, thank you. - No worries.
- Public trust is still so high here,
a toddler can be left napping in fresh air.
Nearly 90% of Danes have a high level of trust in others.
Trust isn't just nice.
It's critical.
Trust equals less corruption and crime, more investment,
collaboration, productivity.
Academics have put a value on trust - some think trust
accounts for 25% of Danish wealth!
I do think trust is the secret sauce,
the glue that hold Scandinavia, and Scandinavians together,
and makes this one of the most successful parts of the planet ever.
So, how do you build trust?
Well, in Denmark one way's through joining a club.
For football, volunteering, activism, art, anything.
Many are helped and subsidised by the government.
90% of Danes are members of clubs.
On average, they join nearly three each.
CHORUS ENDS
Choirs are hugely popular.
Phie Ambo helped found this one.
So, you are not a church choir?
- We're not at all a church choir.
We are actually a choir that works against the fossil fuel industry.
- Through song? - Through song.
- Through your voices. - Through our voices.
- And through gathering together? - Yeah, yeah.
- Danes are brilliant at joining and starting clubs and associations.
- That's why it's so important to gather
and make communities that can work together.
- SPEAKS DANISH
This is key.
Danes belong to more groups,
clubs and unions than any other nationality.
That helps build trust, happiness, and social cohesion.
WHISPERS: I've got the words on my phone.
THEY HUM
LAUGHTER AND CHEERING
But it would be wrong to think there are no problems in Denmark.
All this social cohesion means outsiders can sometimes feel
unwelcome - if you don't conform here, it can feel uncomfortable.
Just like in Sweden, here in Denmark,
there have been issues, I think it's fair to say,
and controversy surrounding migration and immigration.
But the government here has been tackling it very differently.
I met up with Mohammed Aslam, cab driver and campaigner.
Mohammed? - Hello. I'm Simon
Hello, Simon. - Very nice to see you.
- Same here.
- Mohammed speaks English but prefers Danish.
You must be a very proud father.
- I am. I am!
But still we are not accepted as an equal in the country.
- Partly in response to the crimewave in Sweden and terrorism here,
Denmark's taken a really tough line on integration.
Not just encouraging it, but pushing it.
Islamic full-face coverings are banned.
The Government even
introduced what was called a "ghetto law" -
aimed at preventing neighbourhoods being dominated by so-called
"non-Western" immigrants, along with high crime and unemployment.
Let's get out. - Yes. - Go and have a look.
One designated ghetto was the multicultural neighbourhood
Mjolnerparken, where Mohammed raised his family.
What's particularly extraordinary, unusual, extreme
perhaps about this law is the identification of non-Western.
It's basically saying that
if you're not from Western Europe or some of the English-speaking
countries - Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc,
then you can be classed as non-Western,
and the state as a result treats you differently.
This was classed as a ghetto
because more than 50% of people came from non-Western backgrounds.
To reduce that number, some families were actually forced to relocate.
Mohammed's was one of them.
- Yeah. - Are you OK?
- Mm. I'm OK.
- You'd rather not look at it? - Yeah.
- What reasons did they give you for the evictions?
And in many ways, non-Western means brown or black.
Brown, black, or Muslim.
That's my reading and interpretation of the law.
Is that yours?
- Exactly the same.
- The people were forced out of their homes.
The apartments, houses, homes they lived in, were sold off.
Many were refurbished.
New families have moved in.
It's been described as the social experiment of the century.
It's also been described as social policy with a bulldozer.
No-one's ended up homeless, but Mohammed's family,
and thousands more from other ghetto areas have been or will be
rehoused in predominantly white areas...
..with the stated aim they'll become more integrated into Danish
society, with access to better jobs and education.
And people, including those from very different cultures,
will absorb Danish liberal values.
Reports identified early language skills as key to integration,
so non-Western parents in ghetto areas are now required to
send their one-year-olds to preschools to ensure they learn
Danish, and "traditions and values"
- or they lose government welfare benefits.
Ghettos have since been renamed "parallel societies".
Did your children play here? - Yeah.
We played together with the kids here.
- The Danish government, of course, will say that they were worried.
They are worried about integration.
They now talk about parallel societies, don't they?
Do you see that concern, that issue?
Some say these polices are racist.
Mohammed is part of a group mounting a legal challenge.
Others say that they're an attempt to eradicate
pockets of deprivation, integrate newcomers into super-successful
Denmark and prevent the kind of violence happening in Sweden.
The laws have support across much of the political spectrum here.
I really want to understand what's happening here.
I'm being allowed into the Danish Parliament.
MP and housing spokesman Thomas Monberg is
part of the governing coalition led by his Social Democratic Party
and including parties called the Liberals and the Moderates.
We've got football tops here.
- Yes, football over there...
- Is this your... This is your party? - Yes, it is.
- Look at - this is very nuclear family,
very traditional old poster here.
- Yes, it is. - Family values.
- Family values but the children have to be safe
and nicely home from school.
- It's interesting you have this in your office,
because your party is unusual from our perspective.
You're quite left-wing economically on many issues,
workers' rights etc.
- Yes.
- But traditional cultural values, family values as well.
- Yeah.
- So, Thomas, can you explain this ghetto law to me?
- We started to see some areas where there were
a lot of foreign people living, and the state of education was
lower and more and more children didn't go to school.
And that was something we had to do something about.
- But why focus on this phrase "non-Western"?
Why? Why that?
Because it sounds like it's targeted at -
it sounds like it's targeted mainly at Muslims, in truth.
- But it's not.
That's because of the culture we have in Denmark.
And that's about equality of gender.
That's equality of education, welfare, and all that.
- Are you saying that non-Western people, people outside that
definition, have less awareness or understanding of those core values?
- We can't accept that a girl growing up in society
in Denmark doesn't have the same rights as every other girl.
- So, you're saying this is an attempt to enforce
and impose fundamental Danish values?
- Yes, because we want everybody that lives here to have a good life.
- But what you're talking about is, is painful for some people.
You are literally requiring people to move out of their homes.
You are creating a lot of trauma for some people.
- I don't think you always can say trauma
because not many are getting evicted.
We have... - I've met somebody... - Yes, yes, yes. - ..who's crying.
- Yes, yes, yes. I know, I know.
If you have to have a society as ours, you have to be aware of
what's keep us together, than what's taking us apart.
And the things that could take us apart is
if people were living parallel to each other in restricted
areas where there only were people of non-Western.
You couldn't get any integration
because who should integrate those people in the Danish society?
You have to have Danes to integrate these people into society to,
to give them our values and the feelings of our values,
because they're universal for us, these values.
- THEY SPEAK DANISH
This is the most traditional Danish dish lunch I have seen.
- Yes, it is.
- My wife is half Danish.
- Oh, yeah. - So...yeah,
the open sandwich...
- Is number one. - Is number one. - Yeah.
- I know from personal experience Danes can be brutally honest.
They don't shy from tough conversations or facts.
Oh, my goodness. - Yes.
- Unlike other European states, the government here publishes
controversial and worrying crime statistics.
They revealed men from some non-Western backgrounds are as much
as six times more likely to commit violent crime than white Danes.
The facts horrified voters.
You release crime statistics showing the nation of origin of people
convicted of violent offences.
Why have you been doing that?
- That's because a lot of people were feeling this.
And if we want to solve ordinary people's problems,
then we have to know which problems there are in society.
And there were problem in society.
And these high amounts of crime rates reduces the trust or
breaks the trust between people living in our country.
And that's very, very important for us.
- The coalition here says by listening to the concerns of all
voters on immigration, they maintain trust.
Immigration's been reduced, integration is required.
Asylum's now seen as temporary rather than a route to
permanent settlement.
I think sometimes in the UK there's been this feeling that
people want something difficult.
They want less immigration into the country, for example.
And a lot of our politicians haven't really liked that view
and often they've kind of ignored what people want.
We've tended to believe, as a country, more in multiculturalism.
I sense in Denmark you don't really follow that path.
You believe more in, in a Danish way, in Danish values,
in monoculturalism almost.
- It depends on how you look at it, because
if you look on it in a culture where you can practise your own beliefs,
that's allowed in Denmark.
But you have to agree it's in here that the laws in Denmark
are made and it's the democracy that stands over everything else.
- In Denmark and Sweden, attitudes to immigration have shifted,
fundamentally.
Leaders here now talk about the financial and social costs.
Sweden's reduced overall net immigration to zero.
Denmark has the same target.
Fewer people are being granted asylum.
In fact they'll offer up to £26,000 for immigrants to return home.
For liberal Scandis, it's a paradigm shift.
I'd reached the end of my journey clear that for most people
the Scandi countries provide a magnificent standard of living...
To be born Norwegian, that's winning a lottery really, isn't it?
- It feels like it.
- But remember, in Norway wealth is largely built on the fossil fuels
that threaten to permanently damage our climate.
And even in liberal Sweden, I met indigenous people who feel
forgotten and excluded.
- It's like a lifestyle that's slowly fading away.
- Scandinavia has enjoyed decades of peace,
but across the region there's a genuine fear war may
be around the corner.
But despite threats and problems, Scandinavian
societies still seem to work better than anywhere else I've been.
You love it, don't you?! I can tell!
At the root of it all, people kept talking to me about trust -
people trust their neighbours, the state, teachers -
they even seem to trust politicians to take sensible decisions.
Look at this. I saw shops left open - where people are trusted to
pay for what they take away.
This for me, I think, is something that is central to the success of
modern Scandinavia, and that is trust.
This journey has opened my eyes to a part of the world we often overlook.
Perhaps the most successful human societies that have ever existed.
Definitely worth knowing a bit more about.
I've loved every second.