Reducing carbon emissions is not just the job of big businesses; as individuals we all have a role to play. But as the driving forces behind the City of Tampere in Finland say, you have to make sustainability a part of the framework of everyday life.

Tuomas Vanhanen, Project Manager, Resilient Smart City Solutions Ecosystem Project / Development Programs at City of Tampere says that planning plays an important role in reducing emissions, so that cleaner living is built into the infrastructure of an environment:

“The most powerful tool for a city to guide towards sustainability is urban planning. We need to make use of the most valuable asset we have. We have planned the city according to public transport, using renewable sources of energy. We are also using renewable materials and not wasting them.“

According to Teppo Rantanen, Executive Director at City of Tampere, scale is an important consideration:

“The City of Tampere is the second largest city district in Finland. We have about 400,000 people in the whole city district, 250,000 in the City of Tampere itself. This is the right size of a city with all the services that you can want to and you can imagine but it still feels like a city that’s not too big.”

Rantanen believes that quality of life is also important: making sustainable living attractive, he says, will provide a blueprint for others to copy:

“The city is full of things that attract and keep people wanting to be here – they say it’s so relaxed, it’s so easy. Sustainability is key to our thinking and embedded in everything we do. One of our goals is to be carbon neutral by 2030. We also want to bring much more attention to biodiversity which will be one of those things on the program for the next four years.”

Tuomas Vanhanen points to the Hiedanranta area as a place where sustainable innovations can flourish. The area was purchased by the City from forest industries over a decade ago and it has become a hub for projects based around circular economy and circular thinking. Vanhanen says:

“City of Tampere really tries to make a sustainable future. We are focusing on smart and sustainable together since we have a strong background in the ICT sector. And of course we have this huge opportunity in Hiedanranta where the City can focus its efforts towards novel solutions in buildings and construction. Right now we are looking for different companies to come in and fill the gaps in sustainable solutions of the future.”

Such companies include a pioneering CO2 removal company. Sampo Tukiainen, CEO and co-founder at Carbofex Oy, explains how the process works:

“We make biochar out of biomass that would otherwise degrade and we convert the carbon into a mineral form that cannot be released back into the atmosphere. Then we use that carbon in applications where it’s not burned or volatilised back into the carbon cycle – in other words, we hack the carbon cycle.”

Tukiainen says that understanding carbon is key to understanding sustainable solutions:

“Carbon has always been fascinating. If you think about it, all life as we know it is based on carbon. All of our fundamental questions and problems that we are facing today have to do with carbon. Either having too much of it in the atmosphere, or not having enough of it in the topsoil where we grow our food.”

Hard business is backed up by hard science, with the local universities getting involved in practical projects to achieve reduced emissions. Marika Kokko, Associate Professor, Bio and Circular Economy at Tampere University says:

“At Tampere Universities we are doing research on many technological solutions that relate to sustainable urban development. We have had the opportunity to do research on for example how we could recover nutrients, carbon or energy from the toilet streams. Tampere universities have wide networks with different business communities, municipalities, research organisations, other universities and also non-government organisations nationally but also internationally.”

For Tuomas Vanhanen, it is important that everyone has their part to play in the sustainable city of the future. It is time to think boldly, shooting for the moon.

“If a city didn’t have these kinds of goals, I don’t think we would have any development at all. So we really need to be the ones guiding the way. Whatever we do now has to support a sustainable way of living long into the future.”