Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog belong to the authors and are not necessarily representative of DecarboN8, or any other organisation, employer or company.
DecarboN8 at Leeds State of the City
The Climate Emergency was the theme of Leeds City Council’s State of the City event this year. Several members of the DecarboN8 team attended to talk with participants about what they felt needed to change in order for Leeds to become a city where you do not need to own a car.
Councillor Judith Blake opened the event by sharing a vision of Leeds as a place where it doesn’t matter where you were born, you should have equal access to opportunities, clean air, transport, and quality of life. The people we spoke to found it easy to imagine how reducing our dependence on cars could help achieve this goal. There was an overwhelming sentiment that a city the size of Leeds should have great public transport. People are ready to ditch their cars in favour of more sustainable options, but they are finding it difficult to shift away from car-use due to the high cost, poor coverage, and lack of capacity on trains and buses serving the Leeds area at the moment. They also feel unsafe cycling and walking in our car-packed city.
DecarboN8 Director, Professor Greg Marsden, shared this presentation with a workshop which looked at transport, challenging participants to think about what changes would be required to make Leeds a less car-dependant city:
Later in the workshop we were asked to map our journeys around Leeds, consider where we could shift those journeys to more sustainable travel options, and discuss what barriers prevent us from choosing those options. Participants spoke of having to travel by car for most journeys because public transport options were unavailable, unreliable, too costly, or felt unsafe. Others mentioned peripheral factors such as their children’s school not providing anywhere for the children to store their coats, making walking difficult, especially in winter.
DecarboN8 also had a stall in the exhibition area, where we provided maps of the Leeds area to participants and invited them to draw their ideal transport future for Leeds. You can see their responses in the slide deck below. Common themes include: the need for circular public transport routes connecting suburbs, congestion charging, a pedestrianised city centre and safe walking and cycle paths.
Keynote speaker, Natalie Fee, from City to Sea shared this quote:
“We change our behaviour when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing”. ~ Tony Robbins
The conversations we had at the State of the City event suggest that people in Leeds care about the climate crisis and are keen to change their behaviour, but at the moment the pain of changing still feels too great. Those we spoke to concurred that to shift this, balance better public transport and active travel options must be extended across the city to provide safe and reliable alternatives to the car, fit for the complex realities of people’s day to day lives.
DecarboN8 is offering seedcorn funding to develop research projects to tackle these kinds of issues. The deadline for applications is 5pm on 27th February 2020.
Decarbonising Transport: Connecting Carbon Targets to Action
Earlier this month we held our first workshop on the theme of Carbon Pathways, ‘Decarbonising Transport: Connecting Carbon Targets to Action’. The workshop was attended by a mix of people from academia, local and national government, industry and civil society. Participants heard evidence from members of the DecarboN8 team and the CREDS Centre (slides for these presentations are shared below) about the scale and nature of the decarbonisation challenge. Through a series of participatory activities, attendees shared their local and professional knowledge to interrogate how carbon budgets can best be used to inform transport policy and modelled possibilities for a low-carbon transport future in a variety of Northern locations.
Envisioning Leeds in 2050 
Low-carbon future for Northumberland
The morning’s break out activities on carbon targets will directly inform a forthcoming series of policy briefings. The afternoon activities underlined the value of taking place-based approaches when thinking about decarbonisation pathways. The very different urban and rural cases, when considered over both the short and long term, produced some fascinating contrasts. A key challenge will be to produce a supportive policy framework and set of technologies which can encompass and adapt to these differences. Insights and challenges identified throughout the day are already being used to inform DecarboN8’s research priorities.
Introduction to DecarboN8
Professor Greg Marsden
CREDS: The Carbon Briefing
Professor Jillian Anable
Aligning UK Car CO2 with Paris
Professor Kevin Anderson
Making Mobility Futures: Carbon Pathways and Societal Readiness
Professor Monika Büscher and Dr Nicola Spurling
Our aim with this series of thematic workshops is to inform research objectives for future funding calls and to inspire collaboration by bringing together a variety of stakeholders interested in decarbonising transport.
For regular updates about upcoming projects, events and funding calls subscribe to our newsletter. We’ve also recently announced our first round of seedcorn funding. The deadline is 27th February and we welcome applications from all disciplines to develop research projects to help decarbonise transport in the North.
Thank you to everyone who attended our Launch Event!
Thank you to everyone who participated and helped contribute to the packed agenda full of challenging and inspiring ideas about place-based decarbonisation of transport for the North.
Thanks too to everyone who joined us online for the morning via our livestream and Q&A. If you missed it you can check out the recording on YouTube!
And our friends at Influential produced this short video for the N8 Research Partnership about the day.
Ideas and contributions from the day have been collated to help inform our priorities and agenda for the future of DecarboN8. The slides are available to review on SlideShare:
The launch was of course just the start – in the coming weeks and months we have many more opportunities for you to get involved and work with us to decarbonise transport across the North:
Seedcorn Funding Call NOW OPEN:
Check our our funding pages for details of our first round of seedcorn funding. A pot of £100,000 is available to support individual or collaborative seed/pilot/demonstrator projects led by UK Research Organisations. The deadline for applications is 5pm (GMT) on Thursday 27 February 2020.
DecarboN8 Stakeholder Reference Group
Our advisory group made up of individuals providing place or sector specific insight. This group will help shape the research agenda, connect with networks, review publications and evaluate projects. Please apply now if you’d like to get involved!
Keep in touch
If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our newsletter to make sure you never miss our announcements about further opportunities to get involved!
Social Acceptance and Societal Readiness Levels
Monika Büscher and Nicola Spurling
Social change is critical to rapid decarbonisation. Citizens’ active participation in energy management is ‘as critical as technology’ for sustainability[1]; not least because social innovation could support decarbonisation at scale, and faster than technical or infrastructural innovation[2]. However, technocratic conceptions of social acceptance and societal readiness are misdirected. Innovation cannot succeed by demanding that individuals and society change to accept it.
Decarbon8 develops a new framework to evaluate the societal readiness of socio-technical innovations. This working note motivates this move in outline, provides working definitions of social acceptance and societal readiness from a socio-technical perspective, a sketch of the Societal Readiness Levels (SRL) framework for evaluation we are developing, and a set of questions that research teams can use to develop the societal readiness of their innovations.
Why take a socio-technical approach to social acceptability and societal readiness?
At a time when millions of people across the globe are demanding action on climate change, and 88% of UK citizens understand that human action is mainly or partly responsible for climate change[3], it can hardly be said that society is not ready for change. However, our innovations often do not enable change. People are imprisoned by mobility systems that leave them very little real choice over how to travel[4]. Indeed, the depth of systemic lock-in and the demand for social acceptance of narrow technological fixes (electric vehicles) and policy interventions (carbon taxes) delay action towards systemic and structural change[5]. We are headed for failure if we continue to design technologies, policies, infrastructures, ideologies that people cannot integrate into their everyday lives. The social acceptability of our solutions must improve. Methodologies that allow citizens genuine participation in innovation processes are needed[6]. A socio-technical approach can enhance the ambition and effectiveness of innovations by inspiring socially acceptable design for systemic change and societal transformation.
What is social acceptance in a socio-technical definition?
The social science is in: the ABC of transition theories, which all too often posit that education, nudging, or enforcement can effect social acceptance, is wrong[7]. A change of A – individuals’ Attitudes, will not automatically translate into B – Behaviour change, and ultimately C – Change in the system. Technocratic concepts equate social acceptance with behaviour change, evaluating the willingness of individuals to ‘take’ the technologies, policies, infrastructure innovations that experts devise. This hubris denies that there are factors that make technologies, policies, infrastructures more or less acceptable for people – they may not be desirable, useable or effective for good reasons.
A socio-technical definition of social acceptance helps us understand these reasons. It sees acceptance as a process by which innovation becomes embedded in everyday practices, that needs to be supported by good design and creative, inclusive design methods. It enables a focus on enhancing the acceptability of solutions. This may imply careful attention to useability, and the context of appropriation, it may require wider systemic change, it will often depend on stakeholder value chain mapping, and methods of collaborative design and responsible research and innovation.
What is societal readiness in a socio-technical definition?
Societal readiness refers to the readiness of a socio-technical assemblage to be acceptable to society. That is, it evaluates how well a solution supports appropriation at scale and at speed, as well as how it contributes to the public good. For example, a fully digitised on-demand transport solution may be highly practical and fit for appropriation. However, it may introduce societally unacceptable levels of surveillance. As a result, it has low societal readiness. Its societal readiness can be improved by building privacy preserving techniques into its use of data and by involving citizens and stakeholders in an iterative design process that discloses and addresses emerging unintended consequences through creative ethical and social impact assessment and design. To give a second example, a solution may be highly acceptable to affluent citizens with high mobility capital, but create mobility injustice for others. By anticipating and addressing issues of equity, gender, age, class, ethnicity and other aspects of inequality, innovations can be enhanced.
What is the role of place in societal readiness?
Technocratic approaches are often based on an approach to innovation in which ‘solutions’ are developed for imagined, generic users, in non-specific places. If people or places do not share the vision, they are seen as the problem.
In DecarboN8 we disagree with this point of view.
DecarboN8’s place-based approach addresses challenges faced across the North as specific, and very diverse places are seeking to rapidly decarbonise transport. Understanding place is an essential starting point for making decarbonised transport futures.
A key question is: How can we ensure that innovations in decarbonised travel are ready for specific places? This requires taking account of place-specific characteristics including:
- existing transport infrastructures and services that vary by place – this variety of starting points should feature in future designs;
- populations vary by age, disability, gender, ethnicity with different implications for inclusivity and access;
- different place-specific systems and cultures of mobility mean that lifestyles need to change in different ways;
- the end uses underpinning travel demands have different profiles across the region.
DecarboN8’s place-based approach emphasises that innovation must be designed and combined in ways that are more attuned to how people wish to, and are able to, practice transformation in different places.
Societal Readiness Levels (SRL)
There is currently a surge of interest in societal readiness, and various definitions of ‘societal readiness levels’ are emerging. The SRL concept originates in debates about a transition towards low carbon futures2 and the Danish Innovation Fund’s attempt to find a ‘way of assessing the level of societal adaptation of … innovation to be integrated into society’[8]. This contrasts with the more common approach of technology readiness levels[9], which evaluates how ‘proposed solution(s)’ meet ‘plans for societal adaptation’. For example, in the context of future transport, a technology readiness approach would evaluate the decarbonising potential of a proposed innovation, and place responsibility for increasing society’s readiness for it with individuals, communities, societies, politicians, and policy makers. It would propose innovations and then ask how to alter people’s attitudes and behaviours to effect change.
DecarboN8 is critical of this technology readiness approach.
The societal readiness levels that we are developing (see figure 1) turns the tables. Instead of asking how society can be made ready for innovations, we ask: How ready are our socio-technical innovations for society?
At the lower levels in our emerging socio-technical framework of societal readiness levels, are concepts and technologies like electric vehicles, which have the potential to support systemic change but are isolated from real world practice and lacking societal and material infrastructure for large-scale appropriation. Moving up the scale are experimental embeddings of technologies, such as the Tyndall Travel Strategy and the University of Edinburgh’s business travel reporting tool
prototype, which are being effectively used to reduce emissions from academic travel, and are engendering social innovations, such as no-fly academic conferences. Within its 2019-2022 remit, the DecarboN8 Network aims to reach innovations that are at SRL4 and 5. Plans for future efforts envisage achievement of SRL 8 and 9, with liveable, effective, significantly decarbonising innovations (net zero carbon), which are aligned with systemic changes and evaluated as societally ‘good’ by a broad and diverse group of stakeholders, including citizens.
Achievement of high Societal Readiness Levels depends upon engagement with diverse stakeholders and translation of insight into synchronised technical, regulatory, policy, and social innovation. Discussion of ‘Impact Readiness Levels’[10] by the Dandelion project on an inclusive, innovative and reflective societies-sensitive valorisation concept offer valuable insight into the kinds of engagements with stakeholders that are conducive to our aims.
How to design for societal readiness?
The DecarboN8 network seeks to facilitate co-creation of a socio-technical framework for achieving high-quality innovation for rapid decarbonisation of transport in the UK. The discussion in this document is intended as an invitation to members of the network to engage critically with the notions of social acceptance and societal readiness, and co-create a good framework with us.
Below we raise some questions that we believe can support designing for socio-technical societal readiness. They are by no means exhaustive or prescriptive:
- Is your innovation (technology / policy / infrastructure / transport plan / form of activism) ready for the individuals, communities in our society?
- Is your innovation good for society? Now and in future? How do you know? What are the contextual and systemic dimensions of your innovation?
- Have you considered all relevant perspectives? Who has been involved in your design process and how? Have all those affected had a say? Have they been listened to? Have you made it possible for the less powerful to be heard on an equal footing?
- Have people had an opportunity to try out your innovation in their everyday lives? Have you undertaken multiple iterations of your design to discover disruptive consequences?
- Have you considered and addressed ethical issues, from accessibility to mobility justice to datafication? From individual to societal scales? Now and future generations?
[1] EU Commission(2012) Energy roadmap 2050. Publications Office of the European Union.ISBN 978-92-79-21798-2, doi:10.2833/10759.
[2] Allwood, J. M., Gutowski, T. G., Serrenho, A. C., Skelton, A. C. H., & Worrell, E. (2017, June 13). Industry 1.61803: The transition to an industry with reduced material demand fit for a low carbon future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. Royal Society. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2016.0361
[3] YouGov – International Climate Change Survey, Fieldwork: 11 June – 22 July 2019
[4] Anthony Rae, 25th November DecarboN8 Launch, Leeds Crowne Plaza Hotel; Urry, J. (2004). The ‘System’ of Automobility. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(4–5), 25–39.
[5] UNEP (2019) United Nations Environment Programme. Emissions Gap Report 2019. UNEP, Nairobi. P. 54
[6] Cardullo, P., & Kitchin, R. (2019). Being a ‘citizen’ in the smart city: up and down the scaffold of smart citizen participation in Dublin, Ireland. GeoJournal, 84(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-018-9845-8
[7] Shove, E. (2010). Beyond the ABC: climate change policy and theories of social change. Environment and Planning A, 42(6), 1273 – 1285.
[8] Danish Innovation Fund, 2019, https://innovationsfonden.dk/sites/default/files/2019-03/societal_readiness_levels_-_srl.pdf; Schraudner, Martina, Fabian Schroth, Malte Juetting, Simone Kaiser, Jeremy Millard, and Shenja van der Graaf. 2018. ‘Social Innovation The Potential for Technology Development, RTOs and Industry. Policy Paper’. Fraunhofer. http://www.thertoinnovationsummit.eu/en/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/20181220_RTO-Innovation-Summit_Policy-Paper-1.pdf.
[9] Mankins, John C. 1995. ‘Technology Readiness Levels. White Paper’. NASA. https://aiaa.kavi.com/apps/group_public/download.php/2212/TRLs_MankinsPaper_1995.pdf.
[10] Dandelion Project. (2018). IIRS Valorisation Methodology. http://www.dandelion-europe.eu/en/infobase/iirs-valorisation-methodology-/iirs-valorisation-methodology-1.html
DecarboN8 Launch Slides
The full slide presentation from our Launch last week is now available.
You can also watch the video from the livestream on our Youtube channel.
The Liftshare video from Slide 51 can be viewed here.
Aligning UK Car Emissions with the Paris Agreement
Contributed by Kevin Anderson
Taking the temperature and equity commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement at face value places mitigation demands on wealthy industrial nations far beyond anything thus far countenanced. Interpreting Paris through the science in the IPCC’s most recent report demonstrates the importance of living within a tight and rapidly dwindling carbon budget.
Provisional work by UKERC and Tyndall Manchester for Decarbon8, estimates a UK Paris-compliant carbon budget, subsequently apportioned to different UK sectors, including car travel. The implications are profound. Even if the UK car fleet is completely decarbonised by 2035, the number of vehicle-km travelled will still need to be cut in half if the sector is to make its fair contribution to delivering on the Paris commitments.
Talking Transport at the Leeds Climate Strike
Shona McCulloch, DecarboN8 Network Coordinator
The Climate Strike in Leeds on Friday was one of the best attended demonstrations I’ve seen over my years in the city. The atmosphere was energetic and optimistic, with people of all ages and backgrounds coming together in the sun to support the global youth-led movement to stop climate change.
Whilst the blazing sun and clear blue skies raised people’s spirits, they also served to underline the issue: it was 20°C, which is 8°C hotter than Leeds’ average for this time of year.
Some of the protesters kindly shared their time to explain how they thought transport could be decarbonised where they live, to help end the climate crisis.
Arjun
“Public transport is far too costly to justify using it long term. I used to go to school on the train and as soon as I was able to drive it was cheaper for me to take a car, so it needs to be a lot cheaper to encourage people to use it. Keighley has a lot of really good transport connections in terms of you can get pretty much everywhere, but it’s just so expensive, even with a Railcard it costs a lot of money to go anywhere in the country really.
“For example, last summer I was able to InterRail around Europe for less than £400, I went to 8 different countries, but if I just wanted to go Skipton for a month it would cost me about the same amount! It cost me £80 to get to Inverness the other week, and that was with an advance fare and with one of these split tickets you can do now that are cheaper, but even so, that was extortionate. I think that the more expensive you make it the fewer people use it, so the less they can invest in making it better, so they’re in a downward spiral and it’s not going to get better unless there are some changes from the very top.
“The buses are too expensive as well, because I’m used to public transport in London where I study, where for £1.50 I can travel for an hour on the bus. I came back here at the beginning of summer and was getting a bus from my grandparents’ house, they live in Clayton in Bradford, just down to the town centre, and it cost me £2.50 for a single, and it was walking distance, it’s too much. The thing is in London transport works, I mean of course you do see loads of cars in London, but for most people they tend to use public transport because it’s the most efficient way to travel in London, it works and it’s affordable.”
Valentine (right)
“I live in the city centre and I don’t drive at all, I usually take the bus a lot, and I think there’s this thing in England where the way buses are priced is really, really expensive and really weird, and that doesn’t push people to take the bus, rather it pushes them to use their cars.”
Richard (Burgon, MP for Leeds East)
“I’m here today because free market fundamentalism has actually brought the globe to the brink of climate catastrophe. It’s killing species around the world, and if anyone thinks that the species of humanity is somehow immune from this threat, then they’re wrong, because this really could see the end of humanity on this planet. So I’m here today to say enough is enough, to celebrate the fact that trade unions and young people leading grassroots campaigns against climate catastrophe are working together.
“Cross Gates, where I live, has a train service which I use. It would be good to have those trains more frequently, and I think we need an expansion of train services, and we need to bring the buses back into local authority regulation. It’s very easy to condemn people for not using public transport, but when the public transport is not there for them to use, or is disproportionately expensive, or disproportionately awkward, or requires older or vulnerable people or women to walk on their own through secluded areas to get to bus stops etc. that needs to change as well.”
Fran
“I live just outside Leeds, and I walked to work today and then to the strike. Leeds needs better buses, more reliable buses, better cycle routes that aren’t as dangerous, and maybe cycle paths you don’t have to share with a bus. Putting a cycle lane and a bus in the same place is quite scary, I would cycle more if it was safer.”
Dawn
“I live up Meanwood / Moortown way and work over in Gipton, and since there are no buses that go that way, and I don’t want to cycle with the traffic, I went by car to work this morning and then I’ve come by car into the city centre.
“I think there needs to be a decent public transport system across Leeds that doesn’t just centre on the city centre, it needs to link across the city centre. I think there need to be roads that are simply for bikes and, it’s a bit of a contradiction, but turning all the streetlights off after midnight is not particularly helpful or safe for cyclists either.”
John and Kina
John: “As a union branch (UNISON at Leeds Teaching Hospitals) we recognise that Leeds Teaching Hospitals has a massive carbon footprint because of all the travel that comes into Leeds, what with all the staff and all the patients and ambulances, so I think we’ve got a responsibility to discuss how in 2019 people travel to work and to think about public transport. I think public transport should be nationalised.”
Kina: “I usually use public transport and I live in South Leeds. Public transport is rubbish where I live to be honest, it’s very unreliable, but I got here, which is the most important thing! I don’t know how the transport could be improved really because the buses aren’t electric are they? Not all of them. So hopefully, with this protest, they would consider that and make some changes in the near future.”
John: “I come to Leeds every day on the bus from Morley, the service is rubbish, really infrequent, and I think, yes, electric buses, I completely agree with that, but also the frequency: if they were more frequent, more reliable – which is important, they’re very unreliable – fewer people would use their car. If you knew your bus was coming you’d use the bus. You know, people tend to take the easier option, because they’re not sure of the service, if you think “I’ve got to get to work in X amount of minutes” and you know that the bus may or may not come, you might have to take the safe option.
“Patients always get very upset about the cost of parking at the hospital, that’s the main thing, but you know maybe we should be looking at that in a different way, looking for out of town car parking and then park and ride systems, because that’ll take the pressure off patients from having to worry about car parking fees.”
Kevin and Vicky
Kevin: “I’m here to support the workers on strike and the students that are on strike as well, I’m involved in the local Trades Union Council, the Socialist Party, and the Unite Community union, and we want to support the young people taking this action. We think there’s a responsibility on the trade union movement to come up with proper solutions to the climate emergency. We’ve challenged the government, but we’ve equally challenged the trade union movement to come up with solutions, so we’re promoting the Leeds TUC Climate Change conference on the 19th October.”
Vicky: “I’m a socialist and trade unionist, and as Kevin says I think it falls to the trade unions to support the lead that’s been taken by young people over getting out on the streets, walking out of schools and colleges, and making a stand against climate change, but not just that but also system change.
“Just on a tiny microcosmic scale, I live in a satellite type small town where we have two bus companies that service us into the main hub (Sowerby Bridge), they rival each other to provide the service and they run their buses three minutes apart on the hour, so that they can try and jostle for the business, which leaves us waiting an hour for a bus, and is an absolute joke. I’m in favour of nationalising the transport system, properly integrating it, and letting us do our part to help save the planet.”
“I got here today by getting the hourly bus, one of them, luckily, which took me to Sowerby Bridge where I jumped on a train and came to Leeds. My journey was good, I’m a driver but I prefer not to use the car, I don’t have a car at the moment, and I am an advocate for a properly run integrated nationalised transport system. We need to end the transport situation that we’re living with which is absolute joke, for old people as well, I mean, I can walk to the local station, but what if you can’t?”
Tim
“I live between Headingley and Meanwood and I walk through the woods to work every day. Leeds needs massive improvements in infrastructure for walking and cycling, and better public transport, better subsidised, and much better public transport going around the city as well as going in and out, like the number 91 bus for example.
“By better I mean more frequent and reliable, at the moment there’s some days when the 91 bus is only once an hour, or it doesn’t even turn up, so trying to get from Meanwood to Pudsey, which a lot of people do, it just doesn’t come, and so, it’s just very, very difficult. I do as much as I can with the local Greens, I’m the coordinator of Headingley Green Party, so I do as much as I can to lobby for better transport.”
Isobella, Ellie and Chris
Isobella: “I live in Pudsey and I cycled here today. There was a lot of traffic, there’s a lot of pollution so I usually cycle with a mask, but it’s in the washing machine, so I didn’t wear it today and I could just smell all the fumes, it was awful.”
Ellie: “I’m not sure if this is a viable option but could we have electric buses? In Pudsey? In Bristol where I go to uni I’m pretty sure that all of the buses are electric, so I don’t see why we can’t have that. Or trams?”
Chris: “Yeah there was talk a few years ago about having trams in and around Leeds, but it didn’t happen due to costs and changes in the council. Where I live, it’s a small village, one of the trams did come pretty near, and it would have made life so much easier: yes it would have meant having to change half way, so the journey would’ve been longer, but it would’ve been greener. Even the buses around Leeds, a lot of them are now hybrids which is great, but if they’re only local services why do they need a great big diesel engine?”
Ellie: “Also, whenever I wait for the bus I always look at the cars going past the bus stop, and the majority of them have one person in them, so if all those people just got off the road, and got on a bus, then you know, we’d have probably more buses, because we would need more buses, but there would be so much more space on the road, and there would be so much less pollution.”
Isobella: “They need to stop cancelling every other train, that’s really annoying, because sometimes I’ll cycle in and get the train home, or get the train in and cycle home, and the buses don’t run frequently, and the trains are really bad, especially for wheelchair access as some of them don’t have an accessible toilet. We get two-carriage trains for the Leeds-Manchester rush hour, two of the biggest cities in the UK at the busiest time of the day, so it just doesn’t make sense does it?”
DecarboN8 is looking at how to cut carbon from transport in the short and long-term. As can be seen from people’s day to day experiences of transport in and around Leeds, there is a lot that could be done today without huge innovation, if priorities were set differently. We will be doing more to explore carbon quick wins in the coming months.
DecarboN8 at the Newcastle Climate Strike
Dr Sara Walker, Newcastle University
Today on 20th September I joined the climate strike. Newcastle University had an information stand outside Kings Gate Building, opposite the Civic Centre rally point for the Newcastle City climate strike. Staff were on hand to talk to colleagues, students and the public about our work, and how it can contribute to climate change mitigation.
Newcastle University has declared a climate emergency and is inviting staff, students and the public to join an event on 15th November, to begin the conversation about what we can and should do as thought leaders in this space, and I find it refreshing to see the University engaging with the local community on this topic.
Whilst I stood at the stand on this glorious autumn day (it is 19C here today, above the average of 10-15C for this time of year) it was a little easier to feel optimistic about the future. Millions around the globe are taking action. Small steps by individuals which cumulatively add to a crescendo of voices.
Shared mobility – where now, where next? Second report of the Commission on Travel Demand
Today at the Smart Transport Conference in Birmingham, DecarboN8 lead, Greg Marsden, launched the CREDS (Commission on Travel Demand) Shared Mobility Inquiry report.
The report makes 20 recommendations, outlining how the UK could use shared mobility to help meet our Net Zero by 2050 commitment.
By ‘shared mobility’ the report refers to:
Shared ownership: where use of a vehicle is shared between people, i.e. ‘car clubs’, car share schemes, fractional ownership, and bike share schemes.
Shared at the point of use: pay-per-trip ride sharing (or trip sharing) like airport shuttles. In the future, this may include ‘robot taxis’ where self-driving vehicles pick up and drop off different people as needed.
The report notes that shared mobility is a relatively cheap and easy way to cut emissions from transport, by better utilising the technology and infrastructure we already have:
“More intensive use of fewer vehicles already offers a cost-effective, socially progressive and implementable set of options to cut carbon.”
The report also points out the dangers of not moving towards increased sharing, noting that even if all vehicles were electric by 2050, sustaining the current rate of growth in individual car use would be incredibly resource-intensive.
Business as usual projection of growth in car ownership
Of particular interest to DecarboN8 is the report’s emphasis on finding different solutions for the edges of towns and rural areas. These places often have fewer alternatives than cities and so will need different ways to access cars in a more shared future. The report also recommends shared travel hubs alongside on busy motorway corridors which could apply to the North.
Challenging those who think sharing would be too difficult a policy to sell, the report asks:
“If not sharing, then what? What policies will reduce the energy requirements of building the vehicle fleet, even when it is electric? Which policies will enable both short-term and long-term carbon pathway compliant transport policy? What makes other policy options more palatable than a major focus on increased sharing?”
The inquiry found that shared mobility could contribute to rapidly decarbonising transport as part of a wider mix of integrated transport options, and that it would offer additional benefits in terms of congestion, financial inclusion, and social integration.
Visit CREDS to see the full report, recommendations and a graphic summarising the main messages.