Climate Innovation Through Interactive Ecosystem Summits
On the 1st of March the local ecosystem workshop in Turku took place as part of the cities 4.0 program. When the mayor of Turku, Minna Arve, opened the session she had a clear view on the multi-crises challenges that we face as a society in this decennium. She proudly mentioned the huge efforts made already by the citizens of Turku and the local government to reduce greenhouse gas with over 50% compared to 1990.
Road transport represents 25% of the total emissions and is the domain Turku chose to focus on in the Cities 4.0 program. The objective of the workshop was to identify the main challenges Turku has in eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from mobility.
The mayor challenged the participants in the workshop to take 2029 as the deadline for becoming climate neutral. That is the year that the City of Turku celebrates its 800 year anniversary. The stakeholders in the workshop represented city government, Turku Science Park, Turku University, Business Finland, local companies, students and many other stakeholders. Everyone got to work from the start with the Ecosystem Game that ESTI had brought for enabling multi-stakeholder innovation collaboration. The group enjoyed building a collaboration on solving an off-topic, healthcare related challenge before starting to work in teams on the sustainable mobility challenges.
The mobility challenge was introduced by the ESTI foundation with a number of possible future scenarios for sustainable mobility. Two of these possible scenarios worth mentioning are the all Electric Vehicle scenario and the Transport As A Service (TAAS) scenario. Replacing all current internal combustion engine vehicles in Finland with electric vehicles would take 27 years. In a TAAS scenario, Turku would accelerate the transition towards autonomous vehicles. Going from privately owned cars that are parked 90% of the time to a fleet of cars driving 90% of the time. This scenario would reduce the total amount of cars with 80% and would drive cost per kilometer down to 10% of the current cost per kilometer. During the challenge discussions the teams identified over 40 challenges that potentially need to be addressed ranging from improving bicycle infrastructure to behavioral change towards more sustainable choices in transport modality.
As a follow-up for Turku the 5 key challenges related to sustainable mobility will be shared with a larger community of stakeholders including many citizens. They will vote on what they see as the key challenge to be solved. This will then be integrated into the international workshops with representatives from all four regions involved: Bologna, Eindhoven/Helmond, Leuven and Turku to create a number of shared challenges and joint action plan.
“Cities 4.0 project has been funded by the European Union’s Lump Sum Europe program for Coordination and Support Actions GA 101070827- HORIZON-EIE-2021-CONNECT-01”.
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