How cities can transform urban green spaces into carbon sinks – Expert available to comment on lessons learned from Helsinki pilot

Senior lecturer Mikko Jalas is available to comment on how cities can use biochar in urban green spaces to help reach carbon neutrality. Jalas has co-led efforts on Carbon Lane, a project to build and monitor an urban carbon sink in the Finnish capital of Helsinki. The pilot is among the first globally to test the use of biochar in a public park in use, as well as the chart the material’s development with the city and commercial partners.

 ‘Many cities are struggling to find ways to reach their carbon targets. With our pilot we now have a model for creating carbon sinks in urban environments with biochar – a product that you get by burning biowaste, like grass, demolished wood, and even sewage sludge, in a certain way. In the case of Helsinki, our estimates show that widely introducing biochar to the city’s parks would store about the same amount of carbon as a major shift from cement-based to wood-based construction across the city. This is a simple and practical way for cities to store carbon in the soil that is, in any case, in the parks and green spaces around us,’ says Jalas.

The City of Helsinki aims to be carbon neutral by 2035.

More resources:

Watch a five-minute interview with Mikko Jalas at the pilot project site.

Read the policy brief on the lessons learned from the pilot, published in Frontiers of Environmental Science by the research team at Aalto University and the University of Helsinki.

Mikko Jalas’ biography:

Mikko Jalas is a Senior Lecturer at the department of design in Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. His research activities relate to sustainable consumption practices, time-use, domestic energy use, and policies and other tools steer consumption. In particular, his current interests focus on policies, pricing mechanisms and business models for guiding the timing demand of infrastructure services such as electricity. He has also studied and been practically involved in citizen and DIY activities in renewable energy, climate change mitigation and carbon sequestration. At Aalto University, he leads the interdisciplinary Creative Sustainability Masters programme.