PhD Veiko Karu

Peat is one of Estonia’s most debated natural resources: a major input for horticulture and a meaningful export product, yet closely linked to land use, emissions, and restoration outcomes.

Estonia is a peatland-rich country! Peatlands cover roughly 22% of the land area, but only about a third of peatlands are still actively depositing peat today. Peat extraction currently takes place on about 13,000 hectares, and there is also a substantial legacy of abandoned peat production areas where the next chapter is not mining, but smart after-use and restoration.

In trade terms, peat remains economically significant: in 2023 Estonia exported about $160.5M of peat (around 1.27 billion kg), with China and the Netherlands among the largest destination markets.

The strategic question is straightforward: how do we keep value creation in Estonia while reducing the footprint? That means peat-reduced growing media and alternatives, more efficient operations and logistics, and investable restoration/after-use projects that actually scale.

Estonian Business School contributes: helping companies and public partners translate “sustainability pressure” into market strategy, new ventures, finance-ready projects, and governance models that work across the value chain.

Where do you see the biggest innovation gap in Estonia’s peat value chain today: product innovation, operational practices, or post-extraction land use?

A modern campus is not defined by lecture rooms anymore it’s defined by how well it can turn expertise into learning assets people can actually use.

At Estonian Business School ( ), our video studio is built for exactly that: producing high-quality content that strengthens e-learning, accelerates upskilling, and supports the development of T-shaped professionals: people with deep expertise in one area and the cross-functional capability to collaborate, lead, and innovate.

What you can do with the EBS video studio:
✅ Record micro-lectures and course modules for blended and online delivery
✅ Create case-based learning content with companies and ecosystem partners
✅ Produce “how-to” skill videos that complement assignments and live sessions
✅ Develop short, shareable explainers for projects, research, and policy engagement
✅ Capture guest lectures and visiting experts while they are in Tallinn

Where this connects to real capability-building:
📝 E-learning: reusable modules that scale across cohorts and partner universities
📝 T-shaped professional training: combine domain depth (e.g., finance, ESG, technology, raw materials, management) with horizontal skills (communication, systems thinking, entrepreneurship)
📝 Canva-based course design: rapid creation of clean visuals, templates, and learning packs—then bring them to life on video for a stronger learning experience and better retention

For many teams, the studio becomes a practical “content engine”: one recording day can generate weeks of structured learning materials and communication content for LinkedIn, internal training, and partner dissemination.

If you are co-developing a course, planning a micro-credential, or running an Erasmus+/Horizon project with EBS, consider building video production into the workplan. It’s one of the simplest ways to increase reach, consistency, and impact.

Explore our Business Courses: https://www.ebs.ee/en/continuing-education/courses

Mine closure is the other half of responsible mining, and it often lasts decades through monitoring, maintenance, and stakeholder expectations.

If you work with closure planning, permitting, water management, tailings/waste facilities, or post-closure monitoring, Geologian tutkimuskeskus Mine Closure web pages are a resource worth bookmarking. It’s an open, structured knowledge base that pulls together:
📝 best practices + legal context,
📝 evaluated closure methods/technologies,
📝 real case studies (incl. long-term performance),
📝 practical checklists and templates for monitoring and closure planning.

GTK MIne Closure webpage: https://mineclosure.gtk.fi

This is also timely: GTK (with the Kainuu ELY Centre) is updating Finland’s mine-closure guidebook to reflect current requirements and best practices, with the final guide expected by the end of 2026 and stakeholder input built in.

Question for practitioners: What’s the one closure “lesson learned” you wish every new project had to implement from day one?

Honoured to serve as a Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) member of the European Underground Laboratories Association - EUL (EUL).

Underground laboratories are becoming a practical place to move from concepts to evidence: where solutions can be tested in real subsurface conditions for geo-energy, storage, monitoring, materials, safety, and post-mining reuse.

In my SAB role, my focus is straightforward:
👨‍🚀 help turn underground assets (including mining legacies) into usable R&I testbeds and regional value creation,
👨‍🚀 strengthen the link between industry needs, research capability, and education,
♻️ keep circularity and responsible raw-material value chains visible in how underground infrastructure is used and scaled.

If you work with underground spaces: as a lab operator, technology provider, researcher, investor, or public-sector partner. What should be tested underground next: storage, sensors, materials, processes, or new services?

Read the commitment: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/underground-labs-network_eul-scientificadvisoryboard-undergroundlabs-activity-7385907342531354624-c_Sk/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAANzLr4BKB7d5t0JaNzGYz1PuB_RCqeAHrk

#eul #scientificadvisoryboard #undergroundlabs #postmining #circulareconomy #rawmaterials #innovation #industryacademia #energystorage | European Underground Laboratories Association Meet the EUL SAB members! We’re continuing our new series spotlighting the experts who will support EUL’s activities and help shape the association’s strategic direction. Stay tuned as we introduce the minds behind our Scientific Advisory Board.👍 Today, meet Assoc. Prof. Veiko Karu — Asso...

🚀 Looking for future PhD researchers in entrepreneurship!

EBS is inviting ambitious candidates to join the Entrepreneurship Specialisation PhD programme — a doctoral track designed for people who want to connect rigorous academic research with real-world business, venture creation and entrepreneurial impact.

This is a strong opportunity for:
🎓 graduates aiming for an academic or research-intensive career
💼 experienced professionals and entrepreneurs who want to investigate entrepreneurial phenomena through doctoral research
🏢 candidates working with company-funded, venture-based or applied innovation projects

What makes this programme especially relevant is its practical orientation: research is not treated as something separate from the real world. Instead, candidates can explore entrepreneurial processes, ventures, organisational interventions, MVPs and applied business challenges as serious objects of academic inquiry.

📍 Location: Tallinn, Estonia
🌍 Language: English
⏳ Duration: 4 years / 240 ECTS
🎓 Degree: PhD in Management
📅 EU application deadline: 1 August 2026

If you are interested in entrepreneurship, innovation, venture-based research or the bridge between academia and business, this could be your next step.

🔗 Learn more and apply via the EBS Entrepreneurship Specialisation PhD page.
https://www.ebs.ee/en/university/doctoral-studies/entrepreneurship-specialisation

Photos from the last Doctoral Spring Colloquim
Estonian Business School

Mine closure is not the end of the story! It is the start of a new value-creation problem (and opportunity).

I just came across the Post-Mining Innovation Ecosystem LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/company/post-mining-innovation-ecosystem/), an educational initiative that is explicitly positioning post-mining areas as future technology parks, reclamation areas, and spaces for new companies — built through entrepreneurship and matchmaking between researchers, industry leads, investors, students, SMEs/startups, universities, and communities.

What you will find on the page:
✅ Practical framing: society needs minerals, so the question becomes how we mine and how we regenerate afterwards (responsible sourcing + greener technologies).
✅ Strong post-mining emphasis: governance, legacy stewardship, and real-world tools (e.g., their updates referencing REMINDNET working group themes).
😍 A growing community already

If you work with mine closure, reclamation, ESG risk, regional transition, circular economy, or investment into reuse cases, this page is worth following.

Question to the community: What is the single biggest bottleneck in post-mining transformation today: governance, finance, skills, data, regulation, or social acceptance?

Closed mines are not only an engineering challenge they are a governance challenge. Who is responsible? Which authority leads? How are financial guarantees set, adjusted, and enforced? What happens when sites are abandoned, ownership is unclear, or regulation is fragmented across borders?

REMINDNET "WG1 Government and management practices" focuses exactly on this reality: comparing legislation, governance, and management practices across European mining countries and then translating the comparison into usable government structures and management tools for long-term legacy stewardship.

The Working Group is structured to keep it practical:
📝 one track examines legal and governance frameworks (strengths, gaps, obstacles),
📝 another track looks at implementation: procedures, responsible bodies, and the management tools actually used by authorities.

The outcome is not “more reports for shelves.” The point is to help mine authorities and regulators make decisions that hold up in the real world. Especially where mining districts cross borders and legacy risks are long-lived.

If you represent an authority, regulator, policy unit, or standards body: WG1 is where your experience becomes system-level progress.

Read more: https://www.remindnet.eu

🎓 Looking for future PhD candidates in Management!

Are you interested in how organisations work, how people make decisions, and how management can help companies, institutions and societies navigate complex change?

The EBS Management specialisation PhD programme is open for candidates who want to explore the connections between management, organisations and human behaviour through high-quality doctoral research.

This could be a strong next step for you if you are:
✅ considering an academic or research-focused career
✅ an experienced professional who wants to deepen their management expertise
✅ interested in strategy, organisational behaviour, finance, leadership, innovation or organisational change
✅ looking to connect rigorous research with real-world management challenges

At EBS, doctoral research can be linked with faculty research interests, knowledge teams, research projects, external collaborations and business-relevant challenges.

📍 Location: Tallinn, Estonia
🌍 Language: English
⏳ Duration: 4 years / 240 ECTS
🎓 Degree: PhD in Management
📅 EU application deadline: 1 August 2026

If you are ready to turn your research idea into a doctoral project, this is the right moment to take the next step.

🔗 More information and application link:
https://www.ebs.ee/en/university/doctoral-studies/management-specialisation

Photos from last Doctoral Spring Colloquim
Estonian Business School

Estonia’s mineral resources are a strategic economic assets. The key question is how we turn them into higher value, lower impact value chains. Estonia mines and uses seven main mineral resources: oil shale, dolomite, limestone, peat, gravel, sand and clay. These resources underpin construction, infrastructure and industrial capability, while also shaping regional development choices and societal expectations.

Eesti Geoloogiateenistus (EGT) provides the evidence base that makes smarter decisions possible. As a state agency under the Ministry of Climate, EGT’s role is straightforward: produce and maintain reliable geological information through mapping and surveys, preserve and provide access to geodata, advise public authorities, and support informed public understanding.

The timing matters, because industrial policy is increasingly explicit. The Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) is designed to strengthen the EU’s secure and sustainable supply of stradegic and critical raw materials for strategic sectors, and the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA) aims to accelerate net-zero technology deployment and strengthen European manufacturing capacity (including a headline ambition of ~40% of annual deployment needs by 2030). Both raise expectations for faster project pipelines, clearer bankability, and stronger societal value.

At Estonian Business School (EBS), we see a concrete role in helping Estonia’s mineral raw materials sector modernise through socio-economic and entrepreneurial levers. That means turning technical solutions into investable projects and scalable ventures: commercialisation and go-to-market support for novel technologies (exploration, processing, monitoring, circular solutions), investment readiness and risk framing, business-case development across the value chain, and stakeholder governance models that build long-term legitimacy. Done well, this is how Estonia moves from “resource availability” to “competitive advantage” creating more value per tonne while reducing footprint.

If you are active in Estonia’s mineral value chain, what is the single biggest bottleneck today: data, skills, finance, regulation, or social acceptance?

Europe has a long mining history and with it, a long tail of responsibilities: mine water rebound, tailings and waste dumps, subsidence, contaminated soils, and “orphan” sites where ownership and funding are unclear. These legacies don’t stop when extraction stops.

REMINDNET (COST Action CA22138) exists to change how Europe manages post-mining reality by aligning governance, financing, and technical practice into a shared, comparable, and actionable knowledge base. The REMINDNET core aim is straightforward: compare legal frameworks, governance structures, and management approaches for closed mines across member countries and harmonise best practices and lessons learned for sustainable management of extraction legacies.

What makes REMINDNET different is the network logic: it brings together experts who normally work in parallel (geoscience, mining & environmental engineering, economics, social science, law, spatial planning) and turns that diversity into a community of practice with shared outputs. Especially a European mining legacy database and QGIS-based visualisation, supported by an open-access platform.

If you work with post-mining land, regulation, ESG risk, remediation, or regional transition, this is your ecosystem. Contribute a case, join an activity, or collaborate on good-practice guidance.