As a Model City of the Urban-LEDS project, KwaDukuza Municipality (South Africa) has been working closely with ICLEI to achieve low-emission development. Chimene Pereira, the chief planner for the municipality, visited European project city Helsinki (Finland) to study the city’s urban low emission development strategies. Mr Pereira worked alongside Petteri Huuska, Environment Planning Officer for the City of Helsinki for a week in October 2015 to share knowledge and closely examine how Helsinki approaches low emission development.

One of Mr Pereira’s objectives was to learn from Helsinki’s experience with green buildings and energy strategies. Viikki Environment House, the most energy-efficient office building in Finland, provided an inspiring high-tech example of how innovative design can reduce energy demand and slash carbon emissions, for example by generating energy from rooftop wind turbines and facilitating simple but effective practices like off-grid mobile phone charging. The visit provoked reflection on how the built environment can serve as a vehicle to implement and monitor climate change mitigation.

A further topic for study was the relationship between urban planning and environmental planning, and how Helsinki integrates sustainability into such planning. It was found that Helsinki’s administrative structure facilitates a holistic approach, distributing departments for flora and fauna, events, transport, housing and other priorities throughout the environmental unit. Aspects of Helsinki’s planning model could possibly be replicated in KwaDukuza by establishing a dedicated unit within the Economic Development and Planning directorate to address sustainability questions.

For more information, visit urbanleds.iclei.org.