Nina Rilla, Essi Laitinen, Mari Hukkalainen (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd)
Turku wants to be one of the world's leading climate, environmental and nature cities. To achieve this target the city engages companies in collaboration through the Turku Climate Team.
Turku's Climate Team is a network aimed at companies and communities in the Turku region (Finland). It aims to make the fight against climate change visible, effective and communal. The Climate Team started as campaign-based activity in 2018 and got more formalized network structure in few years. It shares information about climate work and organizes regular events. In 2024, there are more than 130 local operators from various fields. The Climate Team's captain is a Finnish ex-hockey player Saku Koivu.
The Climate Team promotes actions to reach climate neutrality by making actions visible, raising awareness and increasing communal pressure among the companies of Turku Region. Impact is formed as a sum of the small and large actions in different areas of environment and climate. Currently, actions relate to:
- Carbon neutral energy system
- Low carbon sustainable mobility
- Sustainable city structure
- Companies’ and communities’ climate responsibility
- Strengthening of carbon sinks, and
- Circular economy and sustainable use of natural resources.
An innovative approach
Setting up a team to address climate actions engages companies and citizens, offers communal feeling and raises team spirit. Furthermore, it concretizes actor perspective in reaching climate targets together. Novel Climate Team approaches have been developed in collaboration with experts of nudging from the University of Turku's Department of Psychology. Also service design expertise is sought to develop internal and external processes.
Key enablers
- Spokespersons and role models of leading companies
- Community support
- Clear climate action targets of the city
Key barriers and inhibiting factors
- Network operations and formulating of value promise to companies took time to be established
- Low interaction. Knowledge and know-how are not exchanged between companies efficiently, and networking is envisaged to be improved with live activities and company visits.
- Engagement of associations has not been sufficient that will be improved by organizing targeted events to the associations
- Emphasis will be put on increasing awareness of the Climate Team by integrating it better into City of Turku’s climate campaign.
Key lessons learned
- Cities should thoroughly consider value promise to companies and other actors in the network
- Attention should be paid to internal process documentation. Network procedures and activities should be well described to prevent information loss (e.g. in the case of change of employees of the city)
- Communication plan should be designed so that information reaches also interested indirect target groups.
Join Turku's Climate Team now!
The Climate Team can be joined by companies, communities and organizations of all sizes that do climate actions and operate in the Turku region. The effectiveness of the climate action is evaluated together with the city's climate experts, and it must genuinely reduce greenhouse emissions, either directly or indirectly. In addition, the climate actions should implement responsibility, promote sustainable innovations and business, and increase the opportunity for citizens to participate in the mitigation of climate change.
To join the Climate Team, the company needs to
- Contact the city’s project team
- Report climate action for evaluation of experts with the help of Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP) model
- Empower others by communication about climate actions.