Espoo invites partners to accelerate sustainability transition

The City of Espoo in Finland is issuing an open call to partners to help create a sustainable and nature-friendly city.

The Sustainable and Nature-friendly Espoo development programme aims to allow both the city organisation and partners to participate in halting biodiversity loss, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and curbing the overconsumption of natural resources.

Accelerating sustainable practices

Espoo is committed to promoting ecological sustainability and climate change and biodiversity loss requires rapid action also at the local level. The city responds to such challenges through cross-administrative development programmes.

Tiina Elo, member of parliament and city councillor (Green Party), who chairs the Sustainable and Nature-friendly Espoo development programme in 2025-2029, said the programmes are “platforms for collaboration, development and piloting” that are used to find innovative solutions to the most pressing challenges of our time, such as halting biodiversity loss.

“However, we cannot solve these challenges alone. That’s why we invite partners to join us in this work.”

She added: “The aim is that all measures will lead Espoo and the city’s partners towards more sustainable practices. We are happy to hear about new initiatives.”

“We encourage all active residents, associations, companies and even research institutes to consider what actions can advance the sustainability transition”

During the council term, the programme will implement several development projects and measures, together with the partners. The goal is that the lessons learned from the pilots and the new solutions can be utilised more widely in the work of the city and its partners in the future.

“We want to give all partners an equal opportunity to propose development ideas. The aim is to collect as many different proposals as possible at once, from which we select the best ones for further processing,” continued Elo. “This is how we strive to allocate the programme’s resources in the best possible way.”