Citizen engagement practices towards climate neutrality

On 24 March 2020, the EU mission on climate-neutral and smart cities held an online event in cooperation with SPARCS project and its partners VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, city of Espoo, RIL and GOPA Com. about "Citizen engagement best practices".

Participants included, amongst others, mission board member Maria Vassilakou, municipality representatives from Espoo Finland, representative from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland, research organizations, industry partners and university department representatives.

Smart Cities and Community Lighthouse projects (SCC1) such as Smarter Together, STARDUST, MAtchUP, MySMARTLife, Trianglum and POCITYF attended the event to share their experiences, success stories and challenges with citizen engagement.

Results of the citizens’ online consultation

As a follow-up of the online event, a survey in Finnish and English was carried out in March-April 2020. The survey was shared with people living in small and big cities in different parts of Finland. It received 168 answers from 13 different cities.

Here is a summary of the results:

• The citizen’s main concern in climate change was transformation of energy system, extreme weather condition and urban flooding as well as transformation of buildings to low carbon buildings.
• The three priorities to make the city greener was zero carbon transport, energy system and zero carbon buildings. 
• Citizens were willing to use zero carbon transport (walking, cycling) and recycling to fulfill the priorities, but also low carbon energy source for housing and preferring environmental certificates were highly voted options.
• The most popular wishes for local authorities were transformation of energy system and transport to low carbon as well as transformation of buildings to low carbon buildings.

The discussions and proposals from this online event and results of the survey will contribute to the draft report that the Climate-neutral and smart cities mission board is currently working on.