Citizen engagement and behaviour modelling for clean air and net zero carbon

Fogg Rogers, Laura; Csobod, Eva; Sardo, Margarida; Vanherle, Kris; Rodrigues, Vera; Lopes, Myriam; Hayes, Enda

Abstract

The environmental and health impacts of climate change and air pollution are being felt around the world and yet cohesive and collaborative policymaking to mitigate emissions are moving too slowly. Behaviour change campaigns instead focus on individuals making life choices within our current system, without taking account of systemic or societal barriers to change. In this paper, we present data from a Horizon 2020 project ClairCity (www.claircity.eu), which took a new approach to citizen engagement through modelling the impacts of residents’ city-wide suggestions. The four-year long project engaged with citizens and policymakers from six European cities/regions; Amsterdam, Aveiro Region, Bristol, Liguria Region, Ljubljana, and Sosnowiec. Several creative public engagement strategies were trialled, including crowdsourcing issues and solutions in each city through workshops and surveys, an interactive serious game about policymaking, video-making for older people, and debates for schools. Personal behaviours including shopping or commuting were modelled in an innovative way using source apportionment (presented in a linked session) so that organisations and individuals can relate to the practices which create pollution. The citizen suggestions for the city were compiled into a series of policy ideas, such as banning all cars from city centre. The integrated package of residents’ suggestions were then projected into the future with the resulting changes to carbon emissions and air pollution modelled to show future impacts; this indicated that if implemented, compliance with legal levels of air pollutant Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) would be reached much sooner (for example by 2025 in Bristol), along with actually meeting the EU target of carbon neutrality by 2050, compared to business as usual. This presentation will discuss the evaluation of the citizen engagement methods so that others can learn from the challenges and opportunities of citizen engagement for enhanced model making.

• Presentation Conference Type: Presentation / Talk
• Conference Name: 10th International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software
• Start Date: Sep 14, 2020
• End Date: Sep 18, 2020
• Deposit Date: Nov 4, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 5, 2020
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/6828459