Team Finland NYC Meets Director of Strategic Initiatives for City of Helsinki

The Director of Strategic Initiatives for the City of Helsinki, Sanna-Mari Jäntti, met with Team Finland NYC on January 17th, 2020 to receive updates on the collaboration between the cities of New York and Helsinki with regards to sustainable development. The cities of Helsinki and New York, in fact, have a strong history of working together on global agendas. In September 2018, Helsinki made a commitment to voluntarily report to the UN on its implementation of the sustainable development goals. Helsinki was the second city in the world, after New York, to do so and the pioneer in Europe. In order to meet global goals for sustainable development, cities have to work intensively together to turn plans into action at the city level. New York and Helsinki have worked in close collaboration thus far and both aim to reach their sustainability goals in due course. The city of Helsinki has outlined the importance of international engagement and collaboration in its report on City of Helsinki’s Focus Areas for International Engagement (which can be found here). In the report, the importance of collaboration with other cities is highlighted with the focus of learning from innovations that have worked in other cities and that could be used in Helsinki as well. As outlined in the report, the city of Helsinki is primarily concerned with digitalization and combatting climate change.

Pictured above from left to right: Marko Salonen (Executive Director, FACC), Maria Halava-Napoles (Deputy Consul), Sanna-Mari Jäntti (Director, Strategic Initiatives, Helsinki), Mika Koskinen (Consul General), and Mailiina Turanlahti (Head of Region, North America, Business Finland).