In its climate policy, Finland is committed to international agreements and EU legislation implemented by national legislation and the national energy and climate strategy. The National Climate and Energy Strategy recognises the need for the public sector, i.e. the state and municipalities, to play a more important role in promoting the sustainability of their own activities, investments and procurement. The emission reduction targets of climate policy require significant investments, especially in the development of land use, housing, transport, energy production and consumption in urban areas. The challenges of climate work differ between municipalities and municipalities still have a great deal of untapped potential in the way they use their climate work. Municipalities have a wide range of support networks and funding to support climate work, but smaller municipalities in particular face the challenge of organising and resourcing climate work in the municipality. In particular, smaller municipalities may lack expertise on the climate impact of different solutions and, on the other hand, insufficient knowledge of support possibilities to finance climate-friendly solutions and experiments. The state of play of the implementation of South Savo’s climate policy, compiled by the Regional Council of South Savo, states that the promotion of the climate work of the municipalities of Etelä-Savo has not been successful and that the municipalities of Etelä-Savo do not have their own climate programme except for Mikkeli. There are problems both in awareness, in the processing of awareness into action and as a tool for decision-making and in the adequacy of resources. The objective of the Mikkeli Municipality Climate 2050 project is to promote climate work in the municipalities of the Mikkeli region and to encourage municipalities to achieve ambitious climate goals and low-carbon solutions. At the same time, the project produces up-to-date information on the greenhouse gas emissions of municipalities in the Mikkeli region, the distribution of emissions between different sectors and the sinks that bind emissions in cooperation with other ongoing projects. The aim of the project is to raise municipalities’ awareness of the climate impact of various activities and to encourage municipalities to engage in unpredictable low-carbon experiments and demonstrations by providing information on good low-carbon practices and experiments and funding opportunities for experiments. As concrete measures, the project will establish a climate pathway in Mikkeli, which serves as a tool for climate education, especially for schoolchildren, but also for other municipal residents, and develop climate and energy programmes for the municipalities of the Mikkeli region in cooperation with office holders, municipal enterprises, decision-makers and stakeholders, which will provide guidelines for municipalities’ climate work for a long future. The aim is that through broad-based cooperation, climate programmes for the municipalities of the Mikkeli region serve as a pilot for regional climate work. The climate programmes are implemented by municipality, but greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sinks are considered in the Mikkeli region as a whole, beyond the individual municipality, in such a way that the regional targets serve as a guide to the municipality’s climate targets. As municipalities act as decision-makers on a number of issues affecting the climate (land use, transport, energy production, procurement), it is important to engage municipalities with sufficiently ambitious climate targets and measures to achieve them, and to make climate work visible and cross-cutting all municipal activities in smaller and larger municipalities. In setting municipality-specific climate targets and defining measures aimed at them, the research results of the coal-free Etelä-Savo project on South Savo’s carbon balance will be used, and the current emission-free transport in the Mikkeli region of 2040 will be based on solutions for reducing transport emissions in the Mikkeli region, taking into account regional specificities. The project will be implemented in the Mikkeli sub-regions during 2019-2021.