Latest news for selected city

The invited speakers provided us insights from their experiences from working with the CASCADE project, which aims to increase practical risk management capabilities of local authorities in the region. The webinar was moderated by Kaspars Vārpiņs, the chairman of UBC Safe Cities Commission.  

The city of Turku is one of the world’s leading climate cities, reaching the CDP Leadership A-list in 2019 and in 2020 and winning the European Covenant of Mayors Award for Best mid-sized Climate City in 2020. The main goal of Turku’s climate policy is a carbon neutral city area by 2029 and climate positive from there onwards and at the same time with mitigating climate change, Turku also prepares for the effects of climate change.

Turku is the first CIVITAS city in Finland and it has become an internationally noticed flagship city of sustainable solutions. To reach the aim of becoming carbon neutral by 2029, the transition to urban smart sustainable mobility is crucial – mobility in 2029 will consist primarily of walking, cycling, electric public transport and sharing of vehicles and citizens will look at mobility as a service.

The goal of the ‘6Aika: ILPO – Climate Positive Business Parks and Value Chains’ project is to help companies find new, lower-emission and carbon-binding solutions and co-operation models. One of the ways to achieve these goals is charting a climate path. The aim is to identify the emission sources and carbon sinks of the business hub, as well as means of reducing emissions.

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,

Decarbonizing mobility lies at the heart of efforts to mitigate climate change in urban areas. This looms in the vicinity for the city of Turku in Finland, aiming to become carbon neutral by year 2029. To reach this goal, a broad range of measures to decarbonize transport is naturally needed. In Turku, the focus of approaching the mobility decarbonization ranged from stakeholder integration on regional and local level to practical measures.

The first UBC TALKS after the summer break was organized on 22 September with the topic of "Local work on the Sustainable Development Goals in UBC Cities"

Urban Future Global Conference is an event for all the people who aim to make their city more sustainable. This year’s conference attracted 2500 city changers to Oslo to learn more about topics such as car-free city life, cutting carbon emissions and circular economy, among others.

New report on UBC cities’ environmental data disclosure to CDP highlights increased interest in resilience and growing ambition in climate mitigation and adaptation among the cities.

Back in 2016, UBC and CDP agreed upon collaboration between the two organizations with the first cooperation activities taking place in spring 2017. As a result, UBC doubled the number of cities reporting to CDP from 6 to 20. This year, the number of the cities disclosing to CDP grew to 28 in despite of the busiest holiday season.

Baltic Urban Lab project was successfully kicked off in Turku, Finland, 19-21st of January 2016! The Conference entitled “Building Partnerships for Brownfield Regeneration” gathered decision-makers, planners and experts from the four Central Baltic countries to discuss how new planning tools and models promoting integrated management and co-creative urban planning can be developed and tested in the project.

The project led by Riga City Council has been granted funding by the decision of the INTERREG Central Baltic Programme's Steering Committee on 26 August 2015. Its official implementation period started on 1 December 2015 and will last until 1 June 2018.