“ERA17 – For an Energy-Smart Built Environment 2017” action plan, is a collection of the best ways to nationally further energy-smartness in Finland. The action plan suggests, that all munici-palities create their own ERA17-roadmaps to find out the most useful and efficient local actions to promote energy-smartness and hence slow down the affects of climate change. Oulu took up the challenge and created an ERA17-roadmap for the City of Oulu.

Oulu’s ERA17-roadmap not only sets goals, but suggests actions to achieve them in order to create a more energy efficient city and to lower the emission levels. The roadmap is based on the 31 operations listed in the national action plan and it is intended to be used as a manual among the employees of the city. The roadmap is made for the employees, who in their everyday work have an opportunity to influence the built environment. The realization of the roadmap’s goals will be monitored and the roadmap will be fixed and focused when necessary to prevent it getting outmoded.

The object of this thesis is to evaluate Oulu’s ERA17-roadmap, the content of it, the goals set and the potentiality to achieve the goals. Materials for the thesis have been my work as a project secretary while Oulu’s ERA17-roadmap was created, several city reports and strategies, memos from Oulu’s ERA17-group’s meetings, the national ERA17 action plan and the actual ERA17- roadmap for the city of Oulu.

The ERA17-roadmap for the city of Oulu is a compact manual for the city employees to change their work methods in order to support achieving an energy-smart environment. Lack of exact and numeral goals might prove to be the weakness of the roadmap but this is taken into notice by including ERA17-roadmap’s actions into other strategies and plans which do set more detailed goals to these actions. The results and success of the ERA17-roadmap depend greatly on the enthusiasm and commitment of the employees that are intended to implement them. End-results are assumed to be seen by the year 2017.