The CDP Awards: rewarding cities and businesses taking on the environment and biodiversity challenge

The 2023 CDP awards have been made in Paris at the Louis Vuitton Foundation. The CDP is the non-profit organisation that runs the world's environmental reporting system. According to their latest reports, only 5% of companies in Europe are putting plans in place to reach the 1.5° climate change goal. The awards are essentially all about celebrating companies and cities paving the way.

On the front line, of course, local authorities doing their best to transform Europe cities.

"Investors take a look in which kind of cities they want to invest," says the Mayor of Turku in Finland, Minna Arve. "And if the city wants to invest in the future together with the businesses, that's a great deal. And for the citizens, you have to, of course, think about how and why that is good for them as well. It's about cleaner air. It's about better transportation. It's about, in our case, a cleaner harbour and our archipelago. So you have to speak with the same language. If you are just dealing with issues on the high level, then you may not connect with other people so well. But what you you are quite close in the city is you are really close to your residents. You have accountability and then you have the words to discuss why this is important.

"The great difficulty in this moment is when we look at the needs of our citizens," says Porto Mayor Rui Moreira . "I spoke today and explained that 13% of the population of Porto lives in social housing. We are making a great investment in social housing so that it can be more environmentally sustainable, environmentally sustainable, and we have done it through replacing windows, roofing and everything else. We want those buildings to produce energy. But what I was explaining is that these inhabitants