Åbo stad

City of Turku is chairing the Turku Region Air Protection Co-operative Group. The group consists of the environmental authorities of the region, together with 11 industrial partners encompassing the energy industry, shipyards, harbors, the building materials industry and others. Turku is monitoring ambient air quality at seven monitoring stations in the region. The emissions of air pollutants have decreased substantially with the emissions of greenhouse gases. In 2023, ambient air quality, as determined by the national 24-hour air quality index, was most commonly classified as good or satisfactory. Limit values were not exceeded.

The baseline assessment study for the Circular Turku Roadmap identified more than 700 circular economy stakeholders, 270 of which were businesses engaged in circular economy. Many significant regional solutions that follow circular economy principles have already been implemented in energy production, water systems, waste management and industry development.

Turku has been developing climate budgeting for preparation, steering and monitoring its investments. In climate budgeting, the EU taxonomy classification of sustainable funding has been used as the framework for assessing the climate impacts of investments, which enables a multidimensional examination of environmental objectives and, for example, the utilization of green funding. In addition to climate change mitigation and adaptation, the approach incorporates objectives for water and marine resources, circular economy, pollution prevention, and biodiversity. We collaborate closely with the scientific community in providing knowledge about climate related health risks and their linkage to nature-based solutions and social equity. For example, in the Hercules project environmental and socio-economic parameters have been analyzed together with cohort health data on several time-steps in the largest cities of Finland. In many studies higher greenness has been associated with higher levels of physical activity. Importantly, the association between higher greenness and higher level of physical activity is stronger in the more disadvantaged areas. The studies have also shown an inverse association between residential greenness and depression, implying lowered depression risk for individuals with higher residential greenness.

We have also studied the evolution of spatial temperature differences during a 17 year period in Turku. The Urban Heat Island intensity showed a slight intensifying trend. Relative cooling of daytime temperatures was also detected at some observation sites e.g. as a consequence of forest growth and related micro-climatological change. Thus vegetation is a valuable measure to mitigate the Urban Heat Island effect and to reduce heat related mortality also in higher latitudes.