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Kemi provides an Environmental Handbook for companies, and the Snowman – for everyone, as a figurehead for the tourism of the Lapland as a whole, and City of Kemi in particular.

Four years ago, Kemi launched the Social Kitchen model for addressing food waste and providing social support. Let's take a look at the progress and inspiring results of the project!

The report of 2021 looks into another successful year of UBC-CDP cooperation, as we follow the paths of 21 UBC member cities to climate goals 2030.

How to establish an allotment garden through the resource wisdom perspective? City of Kemi, in cooperation with Lapland UAS, prepared a material package as a guide for city and municipal decision-makers, planners and area users to become a resource intelligence operator.

During the disclosure period, the following cities had disclosed their environmental data and good practices to the CDP-ICLEI Unified Reporting System: Aarhus (Denmark), Tallinn* (Estonia), Espoo (Finland), Turku (Finland), Helsinki (Finland), Porvoo (Finland), Kemi (Finland), Lahti (Finland), Rostock (Germany), Riga (Latvia)

In the previous project the focus was on city organization. All the branches were challenged to act in a more climate friendly way. Sorting and circulating of waste were improved, energy and water consumption was reduced, Social kitchen was established to reduce food waste and increase usage of vegetables. And so on. As a result, Kemi is now the second municipality in Finland having ISO 14001:2015 environmental certificate.

We aim to capitalize on the features found in the residential environment as a promoter of well-being, while also providing social and health services in an innovative way. This will be done in accordance to the principles of sustainable development. The development of the neighbourhood complies with the strategy Kemi has developed regarding the well-being of the aging population as well as the strategy regarding environmental friendliness.

In the meantime, despite the uncertainty brought by COVID-19, we cannot say enough how happy we are to see 23 UBC cities disclosing and staying committed to their climate change mitigation efforts. In 2020 we saw 3 newcomers (Bergen, Porvoo, Tallinn) whom we would like to congratulate joining the disclosure and climate action for the better future. The UBC cities disclosing their data in 2020 were,

Developing public transport to serve inhabitants profitably and ecologically is especially challenging in small cities like Kemi. Almost all the households own a car or two, as well as cycling and walking are popular. With the public transport having a strict competition with other ways of moving, how can we decrease cars with only one passenger?

The City of Kemi develops urban farming – planning an edible park and aiming to discover the possibilities the edible park could offer the townspeople.

A year has gone by since municipality of Kemi did something different, something that no other Finnish Mainland municipality has done. They got an environmental certificate ISO 14001:2015.

Last year we had a work group consisting of people from different organizations discussing could we do something in order to reduce food waste. As a result, City of Kemi hired a vegetarian food expert with whom we found out that even though local groceries donate waste food to charity there still remain lots of mainly fruit, vegetables and vegetarian food that is not suitable for charity. The reasons are that that kind of food gets rapidly spoiled when handled several times.