Tampere’s open business partnership model

Tampere, a Finnish city committed to climate neutrality by 2030, understood since the beginning that it could not do it alone. Achieving climate neutrality would depend on aligning the ambitions of the city with those of the companies, organisations and communities operating within it. This recognition shaped the design of the Climate Neutral Tampere 2030 Roadmap, adopted as the city's comprehensive strategy for decarbonisation, including nearly 400 measures across all sectors.

Within this framework, Climate Partnership (Ilmastokumppanuus) network was launched in 2020, as the primary mechanism for engaging the private sector. Coordination is shared between the City of Tampere and two city-owned organisations: Business Tampere, the regional economic development agency, and Ekokumppanit (EcoFellows), a sustainability consultancy. This structure enables the network to bridge municipal strategy, business development and environmental expertise simultaneously, a design that has proven central to its effectiveness.  

Partnership model: an open platform for co-creation

The Climate Partnership is built on a deliberately open and inclusive model. The initiative avoids strict evaluation criteria, ensuring that entry barriers remain low and allowing large corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises, public institutions, and universities to participate on equal footing. 

This breadth allows for cross-sector mixing, generating insights and collaborations that sector-specific or industry-only approaches could not replicate. Partners may focus on whichever dimension of sustainability is most relevant to their activities, and topics evolve over the years, reflecting both company interests and shifting city priorities.  

To join, partners must first adopt the goal of a carbon-neutral Tampere by 2030 as a guiding principle for their operations. They are then required to identify their primary climate impacts, implement at least one concrete climate action annually, and publicly report their progress. Additionally, partners must actively participate in knowledge-sharing events and collaborative activities within the network.

The network operates through regular get-togethers on specific themes; workshops and trainings based on needs identified by the City of Tampere and the climate partner network; and four annual events for climate partners. The larger bring together all partners for shared learning, debate, and cross-sector exchange. Regular meetings provide more focused opportunities to explore specific topics in greater depth. 

Pilot activities are carried out through various projects and are open to climate partners, enabling the network to move from conversation into action by connecting challenges defined by the city or regional actors with solutions proposed by companies. Together, these elements create a progression from awareness to collaboration to implementation.

Visibility is central component. Participating organisations receive a Climate Partner logo to signal their commitment publicly, and their annual climate actions and progress are documented openly on the network's website. This public record serves two reinforcing purposes: it holds partners accountable to the commitments they have made, and it creates a source of peer inspiration, particularly for smaller companies that can see, in concrete terms, what organisations like their own are doing. Monthly spotlight features and project stories amplify this further, highlighting individual achievements and building a sense of shared momentum across the business community.  

Climate actions adapted to each specific context

The breadth of actions being taken across the network illustrates this diversity in practice. Participating companies span sectors as varied as precision manufacturing, logistics, event management, waste processing, urban farming and financial advisory services, each defining their own climate actions according to their operational context. 

Some partners focus on foundational steps including conducting a first carbon footprint assessment, introducing waste sorting systems or switching to renewable electricity contracts. Others have undertaken more ambitious transitions for example, Ata Gears, a mechanical engineering company with 148 employees, switched its entire facility from district heating to a zero-emission heating solution in 2025, while Korjauspartnerit, a property consulting firm, converted its full leasing vehicle fleet to electric. Greenstep, an advisory firm, committed to investing €5 million of profits into wind energy production. Even a smaller enterprise, like Pikkupaahtimo Pipa, a micro-scale coffee roastery, is exploring ways to repurpose the chaff waste generated in its roasting process, while a taxi operator made the straightforward but significant commitment to run an all-electric fleet.  

The experience of Linjateräs Oy illustrates how membership can drive progressively deeper engagement over time. The Tampere-based powder coating specialist, founded in 1965, joined the Climate Partnership in summer 2023 following a recommendation from Business Tampere. Their annual climate actions have since included replacing all fluorescent lighting with LED systems, commissioning a product-level carbon footprint calculation, and undertaking a full energy retrofit alongside a factory expansion. The retrofit replaced the existing heating infrastructure with condensing boilers designed to run on renewable biogas as the primary fuel, while a new ventilation system captures and reuses waste heat that was previously lost. The company also converted its gas-powered forklift fleet to electric.  

CEO Tero Viitanen has highlighted the network's value beyond individual emissions reduction. "If climate partners formed supply chains in which all actors were committed to cutting emissions, it could enable a new kind of export from Finland," he noted — pointing to the potential for a network of certified, sustainability-committed suppliers to respond collectively to large European procurement tenders.

The network also serves as a platform for engaging collective action among smaller organisations that would not otherwise have the resources to pursue sustainability work independently. The Tampere Market Hall Association, which represents around thirty independent traders in the city's historic covered market, joined the Climate Partnership in early 2023 precisely to access expert guidance and peer support for its members. 

As a trade association, it used its first annual climate action to map the sustainability baseline, attitudes and future ambitions of its member businesses thanks to collaboration with the EU-funded FUSILLI food systems project, which also involves the City of Tampere and Ekokumppanit. As a representative from the Association described: “We want to highlight the perspective of small entrepreneurs and show other entrepreneurs, small businesses and communities that everyone is able to do climate action.”

A network as innovation infrastructure

What distinguishes Tampere’s approach is how the Climate Partnership functions not merely as a coordination tool, but as a regional innovation platform. Alongside its role in convening partners, the network serves as a ready-made platform for pilots and challenge-based co-development. The city or regional actors define a problem and companies respond with proposals. Successful pilots generate concrete references for participants and create pathways to scale, demonstrating how climate-oriented investment translates into competitive advantage for both the city and its partners.

Equally important is the network's role as a two-way communication channel. Companies gain advance insight into upcoming municipal plans, enabling more informed investment decisions on their side. In return, the city gains a clearer picture of business needs, constraints and capacity, which feeds directly into urban planning and policy design. 

As one city representative put it: "It is a channel to companies — creating conversation and contact that goes both ways. Partners can give ideas and the city can present its own needs and propose cooperation."

The network brings together companies that are independently developing solutions relevant to the city’s transition challenges. For example, TheStorage, a Tampere-based technology company, has developed an industrial thermal energy storage system that allows manufacturing facilities to replace fossil fuel heating with renewable energy sources, reportedly reducing energy costs by up to 70% for industrial customers. Texus Oy operates a dual model: returning unused industrial spare parts to circulation, cutting the emissions associated with manufacturing new components, while also supplying high-efficiency solar energy solutions to companies seeking to decarbonise their energy supply. MHS-Asennus, an HVAC installation firm, has built internal capacity for product-level greenhouse gas accounting and Environmental Product Declarations, enabling it to provide clients with verified carbon data for individual installations, a capability that positions the company ahead of forthcoming EU supply chain disclosure requirements.

By channelling sustainability ambitions through the lens of competitiveness and innovation, the network aligns Tampere's identity as a knowledge-driven, technology-oriented city with the demands of the green transition. Climate action becomes a driver of regional economic performance rather than a constraint upon it. This framing is reinforced by how the city itself approaches climate governance. 

The Climate Neutral Tampere 2030 Roadmap introduces a municipal climate budget that embeds climate considerations directly into financial planning and public investment decisions, ensuring that sustainability commitments are reflected across the city's entire administrative life rather than confined to a single department. For business partners, this signals that sustainability is not a policy add-on but a core lens through which municipal decisions are made and that the city is a credible long-term partner in the transition.

Lessons Learnt and Next Steps  

Tampere’s experience highlights the value of two-way communication, open access and project innovation as the foundations of effective city–business climate collaboration. By lowering barriers and avoiding strict evaluation in the network’s early stages, the city built a diverse and growing membership that now exceeds 150 partners. Keeping the model open and allowing topics to evolve in response to both city priorities and partner interests, has created a breadth of perspectives and a resilience of engagement.

At the same time, the experience has clarified the limits of what an open network can achieve on its own. The primary challenge is one of scale within diversity: a model designed to be equally accessible to a single-person enterprise and a major industrial company operates at a level of generality that is insufficient for the heaviest emitters. Engaging the largest, highest-impact companies requires more targeted, often bilateral approaches that sit alongside the network rather than within it.

Looking ahead, Tampere is focused on strengthening the network’s role as a platform for concrete implementation. Priorities include expanding pilot activities, deepening sector-specific collaboration, and developing better methods to track collective impact, without introducing rigidity that could discourage participation from smaller organisations.

For other cities considering similar approaches, Tampere offers a potential lesson: effective climate partnerships are not only about commitments and reporting. A flexible, inclusive platform for collaboration and innovation that evolves with its members and connects city strategy to business opportunity, allows municipalities to align climate goals with economic development and enable solutions to emerge from the partnerships themselves. 

Tampere, Finland

Covenant Signatory since 2009

Population: 255 000

Area covered: 525 km2

Key Figures

Overall CO₂ emissions reduction target: 

• Climate neutrality by 2030 
•  153 climate partners participating in the network across the Tampere region
•  397 climate actions identified in the Climate Neutral Tampere 2030 Roadmap

Useful links:

• Tampere's Roadmap to Climate Neutrality by 2030