Once a day, Katja Suhonen opens her phone to check on her carbon footprint. Every journey she makes in her home city of Lahti, a city in the south of Finland, is studied by an experimental app called CitiCap and the carbon impact of her travel choices deducted from a weekly budget.

“I have mainly travelled around by bike, public transport and walking before even using CitiCap, so it hasn’t really changed my daily routine,” says Suhonen, an early adopter of the voluntary monitoring scheme. “However, now I try to avoid private car even more than before.” If she has any credits left by the end of the week, she can exchange them for gifts like coffee or a free bike tune-up in participating businesses. Her journeys are automatically tracked by the app, and she only needs to manually input details such as how many passengers she is with if she is travelling by car.

The CitiCap app is funded by the EU’s Urban Innovative Actions, which supports projects that test out “new and unproven solutions” to issues faced by cities. In Lahti, that means cutting the impact of residents’ travel around the city. While Finland has plans to be carbon neutral by 2035, Lahti aims to get there a decade earlier. The city has already halved its carbon emissions since 1990 but to get to net zero will take a lot more work. Transport is set to be a key part of that.

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Suhonen is something of an outlier in Lahti: just 5% of journeys in the town are made by bus, with most people opting to travel by car, says Anna Huttunen, who works in the city’s sustainable mobility team and is project manager of CitiCap.

Huttunen launched the app in late 2019 in an effort to get more people using public transport. She says the goal of the project is not only to reduce carbon emissions from travel, but also to learn what the city is lacking in terms of sustainable transport and how best to provide it. Huttunen says that by 2030, she hopes that half of all journeys in the city will be made using lower carbon choices such as cycling or public transport.