Enabling Tiger Leaps

The World Alliance for Low Carbon Cities (WALCC) organized its annual Forum together with the City of Porvoo on September 17th and 18th, 2024. The Forum showcased how cities aiming for carbon neutrality must simultaneously pursue the transformational agenda across all four of the Alliance’s focus areas: Urban Planning, Renewable Resources, Green Building, and Urban Transport.

The World Alliance for Low Carbon Cities (WALCC) organized its annual Forum together with the City of Porvoo on September 17th and 18th, 2024. The Forum showcased how cities aiming for carbon neutrality must simultaneously pursue the transformational agenda across all four of the Alliance’s focus areas: Urban Planning, Renewable Resources, Green Building, and Urban Transport.

This year’s Forum provided city decision-makers with a comprehensive overview of best practices and key development trends across the Alliance’s four focus areas. It highlighted the importance of finding new private-public collaboration models that will also attract international participation. The orchestration challenge is now to integrate substantial, processual, temporal, and spatial perspectives when promoting the agenda of carbon neutrality.

The role of the city as the orchestrator of transformational initiatives with strict guidelines and timetables is a new phenomenon in public-private collaboration. The Forum provided an excellent opportunity for city managers and planners to share their experiences, learn from each other, and accelerate the green transition.

Companies working with cities often like to focus on their own particular area of expertise, may it be in the energy sector or in construction. However, if they can engage more broadly with the city management and position their own contribution to the overarching development agenda of a particular city, they can be even more successful. The Forum offered companies an excellent opportunity to deepen their understanding of the complexity of the challenges facing cities while also improving the possibility of using public-private collaboration to enable tiger leaps.

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Read about the experiences during the Forum

Forum Program

Urban Planning

Porvoo as a transformational hub

Presently for the City of Porvoo, urban planning strongly relates to the transformation of Kilpilahti, the largest chemical industry center in the Nordic countries. Kilpilahti aims to be carbon neutral by 2035. Part of the solution will be based on the usage of green hydrogen. Hydrogen will provide Finland with unprecedented opportunities to become a leader in renewable energy.

Renewable resources

Finland as a hydrogen forerunner

The Finnish government and many Finnish cities actively support companies engaged in the hydrogen transformation. With a EUR 45 million subsidy grant, the renewable e-methane production to be established in Lahti was among the winners in the European Hydrogen Bank’s first competitive bidding process. This illustrates the potential of Finland in the rapidly evolving transformation of the European energy landscape.

Green Building

Co-implementing sustainable transformations

The built environment is the focus of the Nordic Superblocks as Decarbonization Catalysts initiative. This project provides important insights on how to simultaneously align the interests of cities, companies, and citizens. Here, the local context and collaboration practices define, to a large extent, what is achievable in practice.

Urban Transport

Transport decarbonization – an opportunity for Finland

The transport sector is strongly driven by global market forces and legislation. Finland hosts companies that have reached a leading international position in the decarbonization of transport. Public-private initiatives are springboards for innovation collaboration, enabling companies to make tiger leaps and see their offerings become international success stories.

Co-Creating the 2024 WALCC forum in Porvoo

The Forum had strong participation from leading companies aiming to strengthen their position in public-private innovation ecosystems to develop new technologies and help leading cities and regions achieve carbon neutrality.
The Forum organizers are looking for partners that want to leverage upon the possibility of interacting. Please contact Jussi Hulkkonen (jussi.hulkkonen@walcc.org).

World Alliance for Low Carbon Cities Forum 2024: