Lappeenranta Sustainability Watch

Challenge

Climate mitigation is only one aspect of sustainability: how to make sure it is well connected with all other sustainability work the City is doing?

Lappeenranta was selected as the European Green Leaf City for 2021 and as one of the 100 climate-neutral cities in the EU mission in 2022. This is a clear sign that the Finnish city is serious about its responsibilities in climate mitigation. Lappeenranta is also a member of over a dozen international sustainability networks and commitments.

Climate mitigation is only one aspect of sustainability: apart from a climate plan, Lappeenranta has recently launched a circular economy roadmap and is preparing a biodiversity protection plan, among others. All sustainability-focused plans have a lot of interconnections and often even co-benefits.

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Solution

Integrate all sustainability plans on the Kausal Watch platform.

Lappeenranta is active in sharing their best practices as well as learning from others. Open-minded and determined, Lappeenranta was the first city to take Kausal Watch platform into use after it had been piloted as the Helsinki Climate Watch in Helsinki.

Already before launching their service, Lappeenranta used Kausal Watch to organize their climate work. Each action in the climate plan was allocated to one or more responsible organisation units and contact persons.

This already activated and inspired people who wanted to contribute but did not have a clear view of their own or their unit’s role in the city’s climate work. In some cases, employees were not even aware that their unit was responsible for a certain climate action.

Kausal Watch goes a long way in engaging people, as the platform also enables users to plan the work on action by dividing it to smaller tasks. The tasks can have deadlines and automatic reminders.

Having used Kausal Watch for a couple of months for the monitoring, management and communication of their climate plan, they also wanted to introduce other sustainability-focused plans on the same platform. First, they added their newly launched circular economy roadmap, and the next one will be the biodiversity protection plan.

“The platform is intuitive to use. Although people always complain about new tools, there have been almost no complaints about Kausal Watch,“

Petri Kero, Climate Coordinator

Lappeenranta’s Sustainability Watch now has a common landing page, which tells about the city’s sustainability work. You can navigate between the circular economy roadmap and the climate plan and see which actions and indicators are interconnected: for instance, actions that improve circular economy in building construction can also have positive impacts on climate mitigation.

In the next phases of development, Lappeenranta will focus on getting more people engaged and integrating the platform even better in their management and reporting processes - including the reporting of all the different commitments they have made.

“We want to transform our sustainability plans from static documents into lively and continuously updating processes. To make sense of all different sustainability-focused commitments, plans and frameworks, it is crucial to gather the information in one place and make it easily accessible”

Ilkka Räsänen, environmental manager of Lappeenranta