Climate action in urban mobility: personal and political transformations

Abstract

Although many municipalities have climate action plans with targets and goals, effective climate action still faces significant implementation gaps. Implementation can falter due to barriers for the deployment of low-carbon solutions, as well as the lack of cultural, systemic, and psychological support for such solutions. Cultural drivers and perceptions shape citizens' behaviors and can perpetuate carbon-intensive lifestyles. This paper focuses on measures in climate action planning in the Metro Vancouver region of Canada regarding transportation, which remains the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions and has a low chance of reaching its emissions-reductions targets. Shifting towards greater sustainability will entail a challenge of transformative change, involving shifts in systems, behaviors, worldviews, and cultures. In implementation, the full complexity of the climate action challenge becomes most evident. A scoping review of climate action documentation and semi-structured interviews are used to examine (1) barriers to effective implementation, (2) socio-cultural perceptions and approaches to public engagement and (3) novel areas for transformational action. The study found a need to reweight the focus of climate action, which is predominantly set on techno-managerial efforts, also to include communication, narratives and broader systems change, which are the key barriers to low-carbon urban mobility.

Fractal approaches to scaling transformations to sustainability

“…To bring these insights together, we draw on the Three Spheres of Transformation framework, an actionable framework for designing and implementing transformations to sustainability (O’Brien and Sygna 2013 ). The framework emphasizes relationships among the practical, political, and personal spheres of transformations and has been used in research on a number of thematic topics relevant to sustainability, including climate change (O’Brien 2018 ; Jacobson et al 2020 ; Thiermann and Sheate 2020 ; Hochachka et al 2022 ). Three Spheres of Transformation describes a way to engage with fractal approaches to scaling sustainability, as explained below.…”

“…Nevertheless, these measures often overlook the power dynamics within economic, political, and socio-ecological systems and the diversity of beliefs, values, and worldviews that influence these dynamics. As a result, when it comes to scaling, interventions that only engage the practical sphere tend to deliver disappointing results (Thumm and Perl 2020 ; Bain 2021 ; Hochachka et al 2022 ).…”