Under Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh’s mayoral leadership, Malmo, Sweden has become a globally recognised model for inclusive climate action. From the Malmo Commitment to the cross-national Oresund Metro, Katrin’s dedication to environmental sustainability is changing the system from the inside out.

The making of a mayor

When Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh arrived at university to study politics and economics, she looked around the lecture hall and had a moment that would shape her political career. “We all looked the same,” she recalls. “And I started to think about what that means. Where is everyone else?” Her dedication to inclusion has continued to shape her work since.

In 2008, when Malmo’s Deputy Mayor for social welfare left office, her party asked whether she wanted to step in and she said yes. “I’m a very political person, and I love Malmo,” she says simply.

“I saw huge problems and inequality between people in the city. If you want to make a difference in Malmo, social welfare must be one of the most important ways to do it.”

Over the next five years, she served as Social Affairs Councillor and then as Councillor for schools, safety and welfare building a deep understanding of the city’s inequalities from the ground up. When her predecessor as mayor announced he was leaving in 2013, she was ready. “If you want to make a true systemic change to narrow the gap,” she explains, “you have to work with each muscle in the system: social welfare, education, planning — all of them.”

“If it’s not affordable, it’s not sustainable”

Katrin inherited a city mid-transformation. Malmo had historically been an industrial powerhouse, but the collapse of its manufacturing base in the late 1980s and early 1990s left it grappling with unemployment and economic decline. The city’s response had been a bold strategic pivot: invest in sustainability, attract forward-thinking businesses, and build new city districts designed around green infrastructure from the ground up.

When Katrin took the mayoral chair, she brought her social welfare lens to that ongoing transformation. The first step was to convince the environmental department that it would not throw the city’s environmental efforts off track.

“Our environmental department, from the beginning, were a little bit afraid that we might lose tempo in our climate work due to my commitment to social sustainability,” she admits. The concern was understandable. But her response was both practical and principled: “I realised that everything is connected. You can’t make the green transition without involving citizens and making sure that the transition is affordable. If it’s not affordable, it’s not sustainable.”

That conviction became the backbone of Malmo’s approach. Making the green transition work for everyone, not just those who could afford it, became the defining challenge of her tenure.

The Malmo Commitment

That principle found its most ambitious expression in the Malmo Commitment, which Katrin launched in 2022. Conceived as a just, inclusive and equitable approach to climate transition, the initiative now unites 12 pioneer cities and 10 supporting cities in a structured exchange of best practices across housing, energy, mobility, food and equitable economy.

“In the beginning, when I met mayors from all over the world, we were just focusing on the green transition,” she recalls. “But then I met so many mayors with the same concern I had: that if we make expensive investments, we create a situation where people with money stay in the city and everyone else is pushed out.”

She had seen it in conversations with city planners, watching gentrification hollow out neighbourhoods that had been promised a sustainable future. “It comes with a cost if it’s not inclusive.”

Through the Malmo Commitment, cities have committed to working directly with community stakeholders to identify sustainability challenges and their social dimensions, designing equity indicators to measure progress, sharing lessons openly, and encouraging neighbouring governments to join.

The initiative has already shown concrete results. Malmo has developed its mobility policy through direct exchange with Utrecht, improved its approach to food access drawing on examples from Austin, Texas, and shaped its affordable housing work through collective learning across member cities.

“We still have the ambition to be in the very forefront,” she says, “but maybe even more important is to get the best experiences and best practices from others, and adapt them to fit our needs.”

Building bridges between cities

Across her years in office, Katrin has built a web of practical collaborations with cities near and far rooted in the idea that shared challenges demand shared solutions.

Copenhagen has been a particularly close partner. Inspired by the Danish capital’s pioneering work on cycling infrastructure, Malmo has developed its own network of bike lanes and is now planning something far more ambitious: a direct metro link connecting the two cities beneath the Oresund Strait. Once completed, the Oresund Metro would be the first cross-national metro in Europe, cutting travel times to around 20 minutes and expanding the shared labour market to more than two million people.

Beyond bilateral partnerships, Katrin has been a consistent presence in the networks shaping the European and global urban agenda through Eurocities, ICLEI, UBC, G-Nets and Procura+,  promoting not just her own participation, but that of Malmo’s civil servants and political colleagues.

Taking cities to the global stage

Sharing Malmo’s people-centred approach to sustainability is a priority for Katrin because it works.

“I feel the strong support from our citizens to make the next shift, because they can see that sustainability — our take on sustainability — is something that makes everyday life better for them.”

Despite Sweden’s rising national emissions, Malmo kept its own increase to just 1%. “I’m proud that we managed to push back against the relaxed legislation on emissions,” Katrin says, “but I’m frustrated that the emissions increased at all. I credit our relatively lower outcome to our collaboration with the business sector and citizens.”

She is direct about what this means for the broader European picture. “If you look at the political situation in the European Union right now, the focus has shifted from the Green Deal to security, a more short-term, more narrow agenda. And mayors all over Europe are really eager to make sure that our national governments and the EU do not withdraw from high ambitions.”

She points to the human cost already being paid in rising heat-wave death tolls, more frequent and severe storms, mayors simultaneously trying to lead the green transition and manage its impacts in real time. “Mayors know we are able to deliver. But we need the support.”

She has backed those words with action, writing directly to European Commission officials, and working within Eurocities and other networks to ensure cities have a seat at the table where long-term budgets are decided.

The long view

Katrin is running for re-election and there is no sign that her ambition is slowing down. She speaks with a growing sense of the moment’s difficulty and its possibility.

“During my years in office, I’ve seen a shift,” she reflects. “I’ve felt a strong movement in the commitment from cities within the EU. Cities are aware. And the UN and the EU recognise cities in a different way now.” That recognition has been hard won, built through decades of sustained, visible, collaborative work by mayors who refused to wait for permission to lead.

For Katrin, it comes back to where she started: the conviction that no one is left behind, and no one can do this alone. “It’s a firm belief that we really need to make sure that our kids and grandkids inherit something worth having,” she says. “No one can do this alone. We need to work together to make sure the transition is just, fair, and sustainable.”

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Mayor Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh is one of the shortlisted ‘City Heroes’ at the Eurocities Awards 2026. You can view the full awards shortlist here.

The winners will be announced at the Eurocities Annual Conference in Utrecht, 8-10 June 2026. Register to the Annual Conference to join the ceremony.

All photos are copyright of the City of Malmo.