Turku is the former capital and the oldest city in Finland. Home to more than 200,000 residents, the city is a cultural, academic, industrial, and maritime centre in southwestern Finland. As an EU Mission city, Turku aims to become one of the world's leading climate and nature cities by achieving carbon neutrality by 2029, coinciding with the city's 800th jubilee.
Turku's climate goals date back to 2009. Nowadays, the city's climate efforts are guided by several key documents, including the Climate Plan, which serves as a roadmap toward achieving carbon neutrality by 2029 and outlines a longer-term pathway to becoming climate positive by 2035. The city also aims to leverage behaviour sciences, co-creation, and knowledge-based governance through a NetZeroCities Pilot Activity, 1.5-Degree City, to create a community of cooperation and empowerment with local businesses and citizens and foster a transition towards more sustainable lifestyles. One of the key outcomes of the pilot is a set of tools and initiatives that enable more effective and clear communication about complex climate topics.
Digital Platform for Climate
Many cities face a common challenge: how to communicate complex climate and sustainability topics effectively and clearly. To address this issue, Turku developed and launched a new multilingual digital platform on the municipal website. It's a digital space that serves multiple audiences (residents, businesses, city staff, and leadership) and provides tailored content and tools on climate and nature topics to different users.
The platform was developed in collaboration with a digital service provider following a successful market dialogue and procurement process. It allowed the city to reflect on its initial ideas for the platform and revise some of the features to ensure practicality, clarity, and long-term usability. A key decision was to integrate the digital platform for climate as part of the City of Turku's website, rather than creating a separate website. It helped to avoid duplicated effort in maintaining and updating information, as well as reducing potential confusion for the users.
Turku launched the digital platform in February 2025. Since then, all external communication on climate and nature topics within the city has been centralised to this platform to keep it dynamic and relevant through regularly updated news and topical content. The pilot team also created new thematic content, including a section on climate resilience in residents' everyday lives and information on climate change adaptation. There are six thematic categories on the page and altogether 20 published webpages. Additionally, the platform provides access to useful tools and a comprehensive set of maps, including a climate adaptation map related to heat island phenomena, supported by accessible datasets through collaboration with the University of Turku.
According to data analytics, the website has had over 8,000 views (between February and May 2025). It is available in three languages: Finnish, Swedish, and English, and complies with all relevant accessibility standards. So far, the Finnish-language news feed has been the most active in terms of content updates, with news published weekly.
Climate Changemakers Campaign
To amplify the digital communication efforts, Turku also implemented the Climate Changemakers Campaign in Spring 2025. It was the first joint initiative co-created by the City of Turku and its Climate City Contract partners to communicate about climate action in different workplaces in an inclusive way. The campaign also helped to introduce the digital platform to a broad audience.
A total of 22 Climate City Contract partners participated in the campaign, showcasing ordinary people of all ages, genders and professions engaged in climate action. The campaign was promoted extensively through both the city's and the partners' websites and social media channels. Additionally, from February to March 2025, outdoor advertisements were widely displayed throughout the city, including at bus stops, roadside billboards, and on digital displays in local public transportation. It gained widespread visibility, making it a highly impactful initiative.
The Climate Changemakers Campaign reached a large portion of Turku's residents with a positive and empowering climate message. It increased understanding of how diverse climate and sustainability initiatives can be, as well as the active role local companies play in reducing emissions in Turku. Moreover, it also provided a framework for collaborative climate communication between the city and its business partners.
What were the key drivers of the initiative?
Strategy: Turku has an ambitious Climate Plan to become carbon neutral by 2029, requiring the mobilisation of diverse groups of stakeholders across different sectors. Clear and targeted communication is a crucial tool for engaging more actors in climate action while showcasing successes to a broader audience.
Learning & building a shared understanding: Collaborating with external consultants and service providers required building a shared understanding of the broader context and expectations. It was a continuous process of clarification and reinforcement achieved through meetings and workshops. It also enabled learning about new working methods, leading to improved ability to consider user-friendliness and information accessibility in communication.
Flexibility: Working with experienced digital service providers enabled the pilot team to revisit and refine their initial ideas for the digital platform. Some features, such as real-time data updates and user-generated content, were dropped due to technical challenges or resource-intensive maintenance. This flexibility allowed to design a more focused and sustainable solution that the city's Green Transition Team and Communications Department can maintain and continuously develop.
User-centred design: Applying service design tools in the development of the digital platform enabled a greater focus on user-friendliness and the diverse needs of user groups. It made it possible to present the most essential information about the city's extensive sustainability work in a clear and digestible way tailored to different audiences. The digital platform also emphasises visual clarity, accessibility, transparency, and ease of navigation – key features to ensure citizens and stakeholders can find relevant information easily.
Clear & positive messaging: The City of Turku collaborated with its partners to define the scope of what the city communicates on climate and nature topics for various target audiences. It required developing clear and positive messages that explain what climate action means for the local context and build a more coherent and easy-to-understand overall picture. The content was written in plain language, avoiding complex terms and expressions, to ensure everyone can understand the city's work on climate and nature.
What were the challenges and barriers?
Building a relevant and clear narrative: When developing the digital platform, it was initially difficult to determine what kind of information was useful for different target audiences and how to communicate it clearly and understandably. The pilot team worked hard to identify relevant information and build a narrative that is relevant to audiences such as citizens and decision-makers, communicating it in a way that enables city goals, creates support and approval, and empowers action.
Climate-related data and information: Accessibility, availability, and relevance of climate-related data and information for different user groups emerged as additional obstacles to presenting up-to-date climate information. Therefore, the pilot team created a collaborative steering group that included both consultants implementing the work and diverse communications and IT personnel from the city, fostering a multi-voiced and participatory development process.
Time constraints: Working with external service providers required undergoing a lengthy procurement process, which caused some delays in the pilot implementation timeline. Nevertheless, with good planning, the pilot outcomes were successfully implemented within the pilot framework.
Potential for Replication
Effective and clear communication is key to raising awareness about the importance of climate action and the impact each individual or organisation can make in achieving climate neutrality. In Turku, the digital platform plays a key role in building the narrative of Climate and Nature City Turku, supporting both internal and external communication and fostering a sense of shared ownership. It can serve as an example for other cities seeking to improve their communication strategy and tools.
Additionally, the Climate Changemakers campaign offers practical ideas for communicating climate action in the workplace and for collaborating with business partners on sustainability messaging. It can serve as a replicable reference model for other cities willing to showcase people and organisations behind their climate efforts and inspire others to join. Moreover, it can serve as a low-threshold first step for joint action with Climate City Contract partners.
Turku's pilot has already inspired its Twin City, Fundão. Encouraged by Turku's digital platform and communications campaign, Fundão plans to adopt and replicate these tools locally to unify and strengthen the municipality's efforts to communicate about climate and sustainability.
Photo Credit: Landscape photos of Turku by Mika Kurkilahti and Jonne Mattila