Metropolitan Climate Challenge

Metropolitan Climate Challenge Expert Group will strengthen metropolitan and regional cooperation on climate change mitigation and adaptation

The Expert Group is an initiative from Region Stockholm, HelsinkiUusimaa Regional Council, Helsinki Region Environmental Services HSY, City of Helsinki and the Gothenburg Region.
The Group has been coordinated by Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council until the end of 2023 and since the beginning of 2024 is led by Region Skåne (Sweden), Gothenburg Region (Sweden) and Region Stockholm (Sweden) and representatives from the Helsinki region.

Post-it notes at the Metropolitan Climate Challenge Workshop

The group’s activities will strengthen metropolitan regions and cities’ ability to reduce their emissions and improve their resilience. The group will focus on measures that will most rapidly and efficiently help us reduce emissions, looking for ways to adapt to a changing climate.
The Expert Group is open and targeted widely to the practitioners, planners and land use officers in metropolis and city regions in METREX.

We suggest the following strategic areas for the group’s work:

  • Benchmarking and exchange of experiences of climate-responsive planning (tools, methods, cases etc.) and governance, goals, and actions. A forum to share lessons learned and success stories in an open and confidential atmosphere!
  • Identifying, learning about, and further developing new ideas and solutions on how to work with climate mitigation and adaption and Sustainable Development Goals
    Identifying areas and ideas for in-depth cooperation and developing EU funding proposals together
  • Utilising lessons from research on climate and city-regional planning, for instance by inviting researchers
  • Developing policy messages to the regional level and to the EU level, and developing resolutions
  • Communicating policy messages, examples of group members’ good practices, resolutions, and other outcomes

Meetings

This Expert Group will meet online and in person over the coming years. Please see this list for the next planned meetings.

Click on the links for more information, agendas and presentations

Hosted by Mariikka Manninen (Helsinki–Uusimaa Regional Council) and Alpo Tani (City of Helsinki), the Climate Challenge Expert Group World Café focused on adaptation and metropolitan resilience. Members reported accelerating impacts—heat waves, flooding, coastal erosion, and soil degradation—already affecting daily life. Discussions centred on retrofitting ageing building stock and large housing estates, despite high costs and limited finance, and on boosting water absorption, tree cover, and nature-based solutions. Participants also noted land-use tensions around renewables and the need to protect critical infrastructure. They called for more agile governance, as long planning cycles, weak political awareness, and populism hinder implementation. The group will continue support peer learning, shared tools (including narrative “future” visualisations), financing approaches, and collaboration with other Expert Groups.

A full report on the conference outcomes will follow.

 

 

Takeaways

What have we learned during the first five months of the Metropolitan Climate Challenge Expert Group? Read an update from the Metropolitan Climate Challenge Expert Group
Read the press release about this new Expert Group

 

Key contact

2024 Coordination group:
Region Skåne (Sweden), Gothenburg Region (Sweden) and Region Stockholm (Sweden) and representatives from the Helsinki region.

Interested in joining the group discussion, please contact our Secretariat at viviana.rubbo@eurometrex.org

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

Member Only Documents