Think Sustainably: Incentivising sustainable choices in cities

Think Sustainably is an online service that incentivises and encourages sustainable choices in city living and urban tourism. Currently in use both in Helsinki and Tampere, it has been an essential tool for accelerating the cities’ transition to carbon neutrality.

 

Cities can drive the transformation

For a while now, city dwellers and visitors have been increasingly interested in supporting sustainable local businesses. Although European city lifestyles and city tourism are still largely unsustainable by scientific standards, sustainable choices contribute to reducing the environmental impact of city life.

 

However, making sustainable choices has been difficult for both locals and visitors. Usually, objective information about local businesses is not readily available. It is also difficult to distinguish the genuine actors from a jungle of pretty words, commercial certificates, and greenwashing.

 

That’s why we joined forces with the City of Helsinki to define a set of meaningful and equitable sustainability criteria to develop a solution that supports both people and businesses in making more sustainable choices. The result was Think Sustainably: a plug-in service that connects visitors and citizens with genuinely sustainable local options.

 

Since its launch in 2019, Think Sustainably has already achieved significant impact, which is encouraging for our fight against the climate crisis. For example, the shopping centre Kämp Galleria managed to reduce its CO2 emissions by 375 tonnes within a year by switching to renewable district heating and hydroelectricity. Moreover, in the pilot phase, the criteria were tested with 80 Helsinki-based companies. Based on a post-pilot survey, 90% of respondents found that the service had motivated them to implement a more sustainable way of working. The value of the earned media visibility in the Think Sustainably project was six million euros.

 

Developing the right sustainability criteria

The City of Helsinki has been a pioneer in promoting a more sustainable way of life. In 2018, the city’s marketing body, Helsinki Marketing (now Helsinki Partners), was looking for ways to support the changes in everyday actions and behaviour required by the City’s 2030 carbon neutrality goal. The idea was to highlight sustainable services on MyHelsinki—the go-to portal for life in Helsinki. 2.5 million people accessed MyHelsinki in 2021, so what is available there can enjoy meaningful reach in the Finnish capital. By choosing what options to highlight, MyHelsinki can increase awareness of local services, such as restaurants, shops, sights, events and accommodation that produce, sell, or think sustainably.

 

But before this was possible, the City had to know how to document, evaluate and choose the most sustainable options. Helsinki Marketing wanted to create criteria that would encourage businesses to go beyond the status quo of sustainability, and that would also be suitable for businesses of different sizes and industries. It was important that the criteria also serve the dimension of social sustainability.

 

“Cities can drive and accelerate the transformation towards a 1.5° life in many ways, including through enabling, incentivising and celebrating sustainable actions.”

 

There are no one-size-fits-all sustainability criteria. For example, while the use of renewable energy is important for all businesses, restaurants should serve ethically sourced food and avoid waste caused by disposable plastics (boxes, cutlery, bags, etc.). Shops can encourage recycling and repairing. And other cultural institutions can promote the use of public transport. Moreover, one way to be socially sustainable is to “employ people who may otherwise be difficult to place”.

 

But these dimensions can vary greatly from one city to the next. As a result, developing the right sustainability criteria for each city requires expertise that goes beyond net-zero mathematics.

 

 

Updating criteria based on latest scientific evidence

There are many paths to reaching climate neutrality. More sustainable choices by people and businesses is one of them. At Demos Helsinki, we believe that people and businesses can and want to make more sustainable choices. But they need access to essential knowledge and available tools.

 

Cities can drive and accelerate the transformation in many ways, including enabling, incentivising and celebrating sustainable actions. They are uniquely positioned to influence both the supply and the demand of such actions. They can help steer the businesses that they host and support their residents and visitors in making sustainable choices. So far, Think Sustainably has provided enough support for this hypothesis.

 

“Since its launch in 2019, Think Sustainably has already achieved significant impact, which is encouraging for our fight against the climate crisis.”

 

During the course of 2020, the service expanded to the City of Tampere, which gave us an opportunity to update the criteria with both cities, accounting more clearly for social and cultural sustainability. The criteria for environmental sustainability also became stricter, to better meet current policy requirements and to motivate local businesses to be more ambitious in their sustainability plans. We are now performing a new cycle of impact evaluations to determine how the updated criteria have worked and draft recommendations for developing the service further. As the climate crisis demands increasingly urgent action, we consistently update the sustainability criteria, always staying up to date with the latest scientific knowledge and our capacity to create a 1.5° life we can desire.

 

More about the service:

• Watch it in action
• Won the Place Marketing Award 2021 in the Tourism category
• A feature article on Dezeen
• An interview with Laura Saksala, Marketing Manager at MyHelsinki
• More about how we developed the criteria

 

Want to know more? Feel free to connect with us:

Otso Sillanaukee
Expert
otso.sillanaukee@demoshelsinki.fi

Satu Lähteenoja
Senior Expert
satu.lahteenoja@demoshelsinki.fi

 

Find out more about our work supporting the 1.5° life in urban living:

• NetZeroCities: 100 climate-neutral EU cities by 2030
• Getting to a 1.5° life in 3 Finnish cities
• Leadership and implementation of Sustainability Goals in Finnish municipalities
• Five statements for sustainable urban mobility — learnings from Finland
• 1.5° — A life we can desire
• In Lahti, Oulu and Tampere, people want to live in line with the 1.5 degree climate target

 

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Feature image is from Katajanokka, Heslinki. Taken by Tony Yakovlenko / Unsplash.