We're all about sustainability these days, and travellers to Helsinki can participate in a local programme that has been launched in response to citizen concern about climate change.

The Think Sustainably online service helps residents and visitors to make informed daily choices, rating the Finnish capital’s restaurants, attractions, shops and accommodation against tailor-made sustainability criteria. The service also includes a route planner feature that enables travellers to choose emission-free transportation options to the experiences on offer in the city. It's a pilot service for now and it includes 81 participating service providers, but it will be further developed to include a larger range of sustainable choices.

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The process of developing the Think Sustainably service included researching the most significant factors of ecological sustainability-related to different service categories. These dealt mostly with greenhouse emissions caused by energy production, the impacts of mobility and food, waste management, factors related to the circular economy, protecting biodiversity, accessibility, and employment and preventing discrimination. The criteria encourage all the service providers to improve their action towards a sustainable way of operating and has already resulted in several of them making changes such as switching energy and heating contracts to more environmentally-friendly options.

Currently gathering feedback from users, the Think Sustainably service is now publicly available with plans to roll the programme out further and review its impact in 2020. "Helsinki is not finished developing its sustainable policies but is ready to make systematic efforts, both big and small, which work towards achieving a more sustainable world," says Laura Aalto, CEO at Helsinki Marketing. "We hope that others can also learn from our experiments.”

You can find out more about Think Sustainably here.