Towards Carbon Neutral Municipalities and Regions in Finland

Solutions developed

The project plans to achieve the following specific objectives:

- creating smart low carbon mobility measures;
- reducing greenhouse gas emissions of agriculture and forests from organic soils and other activities;
- increasing the energy-efficiency of buildings;
- promoting decentralised renewable energy production and localised solutions;
- developing and implementing climate sustainable solutions for urban planning (including carbon sinks);
- creating conditions for the uptake of clean technology solutions and climate-friendly choices in production and consumption;
- generating, using and spreading new information on climate change mitigation actions to achieve sector and system level changes in climate change mitigation;
- increasing synergies between climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Main results

Expected results: LIFE-IP CANEMURE-FINLAND will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions by focusing on capacity building, infrastructure, technological solutions and patterns of behaviour. Ongoing smaller and larger scale projects are connected to CANEMURE itself as complementary actions. These will produce additional information and data for the mitigation work by focusing on R&D on societal transformational processes, new technologies and unblocking of investments in energy production and efficiency. The project will enable the participating regions and municipalities to go a large way towards achieving the 2030 climate change mitigation targets for Finland. Specifically, it is expected that they will achieve 60% of the required reduction for non-ETS sectors. Contributing to this headline figure, the project will achieve the following in participating cities and regions in comparison with average figures for Finland:
- 20% more electric/biogas vehicles;
- 10% lower heating requirement and energy use of residential buildings;
- 10% more energy from locally-produced renewable sources in residential areas;
- 15% more solar panels and heat pumps;
- at least 20 new municipalities will commit to curbing their greenhouse gas emissions above and beyond the requirements of EU targets and schedules;
- at least 100 mitigation-related decisions will have taken adaptation into consideration.
There will also be a 15% increase in public investments in low carbon cleantech solutions thanks to project actions at regional level and the national expert platform.