Helsinki Biennial was granted an EcoCompass certificate

Helsinki Biennial has been granted an EcoCompass certificate for taking care of and developing environmental issues in accordance with the EcoCompass environmental management system.

Responsibility and maintaining nature’s ecological sustainability are key values of Helsinki Biennial, so environmental matters have been given special consideration from the outset. Helsinki Biennial complies with the EcoCompass environmental management system, which guides the art event from planning to implementation and ensures that everything is as environmentally friendly as possible.

EcoCompass, which was developed by the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, is a system based on international standards on environmental management. It includes 10 environmental criteria that an organisation committed to the system must comply with. The EcoCompass certificate is granted to an operator for three years at a time and an auditor monitors the achievement of the objectives.

“Helsinki Biennial’s strength in environmental issues is its strong commitment to responsibility, extensive and active cooperation with partners, and a desire to promote attitude change and to be a pioneer in environmental issues. Vallisaari’s nature and the Baltic Sea are an essential part of Helsinki Biennial, both as a location and an inspiration to artists. The biennial has invested in responsibility by hiring an environmental coordinator for the project who has brought resources for extensive cooperation with the partners and expertise in environmental issues.” – excerpt from an audit report

Kiira Kivisaari, Helsinki Biennial’s Environmental Coordinator, started the EcoCompass work in autumn 2019.

“Building the EcoCompass system has been a great learning process. To be able to produce events in the future, environmental issues must become an even more integral part of our everyday work, and we must set ourselves more ambitious aims. One of the most important things on the way to carbon neutrality is to understand where emissions come from and how they can be reduced”, Kivisaari says.