This small Finnish city is showing the world how to become carbon neutral

In the U.S., cities like Denver and Austin plan to be carbon neutral by 2040. Seattle and Miami are aiming for 2050. In Finland—where the whole country wants to be carbon neutral by 2035—one small city may get there within a few years.

Lahti, a city an hour north of Helsinki by train, was once a polluted industrial center. But over the past few decades, it’s been working to become more sustainable. And in 2019, it set a goal to become carbon neutral by 2025.

The city is now likely to hit the target a year or two later than that, says Elina Ojala, Lahti’s environmental director. But aiming for 2025 is making it possible to achieve the goal this decade. In a recent meeting with city leaders, she says, “They all felt that if we wouldn’t have set the targets that tight, we wouldn’t be where we are at the moment.”

So far, the city calculates that it has cut emissions by 64% below 1990 levels. While there are different definitions of “carbon neutral,” it’s ultimately aiming for an 80% cut in emissions, with the rest offset by programs like reforestation in the region.

To help make it easier for residents to drive less, the city is building more bike highways and expanding its network of other bike lanes; it already added new bike parking, a bike repair station, and shared e-bikes. It even tested an urban ski-sharing program that people could use to run errands. It’s also buying more electric buses and using alternative fuel in others. “From a city development point of view, it doesn’t solve all problems if we just switch to electric cars,” Ojala says. “So we try to promote all modes of sustainable transport.”

The local hockey team has stopped flying to games in other cities, and nudges its fans to walk, bike, or take public transportation when they come to games. The local symphony orchestra, likewise, is encouraging its audience to use public transportation, and finding better alternatives for its own tours.

A few years ago, Lahti piloted a personal carbon trading app that let residents automatically track how they were getting around town; based on the speed that someone travels, it’s possible to tell if they’re walking, on a bike, or driving. Each week, the app gave users rewards—including credit they could use for bus rides or discounts on local products—if they stayed within a certain carbon budget. The city now offers another app that gives users a series of climate challenges, like using the “eco” setting on their washing machine, or eating less meat.

The city is retrofitting city-owned apartment buildings to make them more energy-efficient and add solar power. In one small power plant, the city uses waste heat from wastewater treatment to send energy into its district heating system. (Unlike most American cities, with furnaces in each building, Lahti uses an efficient network that sends heat to neighborhoods from centralized power plants.)

In 2019, Lahti stopped using coal in its main power plant connected to the district heating system. Still, it hasn’t found the perfect replacement yet. Some of the heat now comes from burning wood waste from forestry, which is controversial: Burning biomass still releases CO2, though it can arguably be considered carbon neutral because the trees took in CO2 as they grew. Lahti also has a gasification plant that turns trash that can’t be recycled into energy.

Ultimately, the city will move to different solutions. “We’re working with the circular economy, and if you burn something, it doesn’t stay in the circle—it’s removed. This is a way better option than burning coal, but it can’t be the final solution,” says Ojala.

The city’s recycling rate is incredibly high: 99% of household waste stays out of a landfill. But only around half is used to make recycled materials, and the rest is used for energy at this point.

Some local companies are finding new uses for waste. A food manufacturer that makes baked goods, for example, is now using oat hulls that would have otherwise been burned to make xylitol, a sugar-free sweetener. The city is also working to reduce construction waste.

In total, the city is tracking more than 113 different sustainability-related actions. “They’ve been really ambitious,” says Sonja-Maria Ignatius, the cofounder of Kausal, a software platform that the city uses to keep track of the progress on each program. (The company works with more than 40 cities, and separately announced a round of seed funding today.) The platform is also publicly available, so citizens can see how the city is changing.

The work is now embedded throughout the city, says Ojala. “It’s not just from the environment [department],” she says. “It has been our overall goal in the climate work to really make it a common thing for the whole city and that people feel like they have a role in that.”

The biggest challenge now is to continue the shift to clean transportation, she says. There’s no silver bullet, and the work involves changing behavior, which isn’t easy. “It’s also difficult to make it permanent,” she says, noting that people might initially be excited by a campaign but then go back to older habits.

Still, she’s optimistic about the climate goal, and the city is already thinking about what it can do next that goes beyond climate alone, including considering a new sustainability goal. “We’re talking about nature positivity,” Ojala says. “We’d have our climate neutrality, but then we’d also have a target for our ecological footprint.”