Germany's Pilot Activity: CoLAB Committed to Local Climate Action Building
Description of activities
CoLAB-Committed to Local Climate Action Building aims to build a strong coalition of change for a shared vision of a sustainable, climate-neutral city by 2030 by creating a wave of commitment to local action through direct ownership of action in the city community. CoLAB tests innovative non-technical ways of reducing emissions from consumer behaviour that cannot be directly reduced by the city. For this purpose, CoLAB activates all stakeholders, from city administration and politics to urban society and citizens, for a powerful city-wide transition team to set up the Climate City Contract. CoLAB seeks innovative, cross-sectoral ways to reduce emissions from consumption patterns in order to overcome the lack of acceptance, insight or knowledge about the possibilities of one’s own actions towards the 1.5 degree lifestyle in the areas of energy, buildings, mobility, food, and consumption. CoLAB tests the influence of social behaviours and norms, how citizens individually/in groups make decisions, participate in processes, develop solutions to improve individual and collective well-being. It is about closing the gaps between changing knowledge and real action in everyday life and making both actors and actions and their results visible. The relevance of these emissions caused by consumer actions in cities is great; in German cities they account for 30 % in the energy-related areas of buildings and mobility alone. The areas of consumption and nutrition are still little researched; CoLAB wants to provide new insights and describe impact pathways here.
The centre of CoLAB is the transformation model “House of Change”, which connects the city with the urban society as a Local Green Deal platform, inspires and mobilises for real, sustainable action, and closes the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical changes in daily life. The city is a supporter and enabler, the citizens are the owners of the “House of Change”, who designs the spaces according to their needs. Mannheim, Aachen and Muenster participate in the “House of Change” with different pilot activities by co-designing the impact spaces for the Municipal co-creation room(s), the knowledge transfer and exchange room(s), the bottom-up matching ideas room(s), the smart challenges innovation room(s), the cultural change room(s) and the local success room(s). They identify breakthroughs in overcoming entrenched obstacles and explore “tipping points” for changing behaviour from individual to collective action.
The CoLAB cities of Mannheim, Aachen and Muenster have identified consumption-related emissions in the emission areas of electricity and heat consumption, mobility, land use and waste/disposal as the overarching challenge to achieving climate targets and one of the most difficult tasks to solve.
Objectives
Innovative non-technical solutions to reduce emissions based on the consumption behaviour of the urban society through the inspiring and co-creating "House of Change".
The only difference in this multi-city Pilot is the entry points of the House of Change as testing solutions. These are described below.
Aachen
Mannheim
Muenster
What are the challenges that cities would like to address with the pilot activities?
CoLAB confronts the obstacles that prevent everyday citizens from making their own contribution to climate neutrality and impact the interrelated emission areas of mobility, energy and buildings, food and consumption.
- Limited influence from the municipality on changing mainstream consumption behaviours: The lack of sufficient measurability of the effectiveness of enabling policies creates the risk that policies will not be adopted or financially supported. Data on the effectiveness, success factors and barriers to reducing consumption-related emissions in the emission areas of electricity and heat consumption, mobility, land use and waste/disposal should be identified in order to develop the right (effective) solutions to close the gap between knowledge and action. These emissions cannot be reduced directly through technical measures, but rely on the voluntary or possibly regulated behaviour of citizens;
- Barriers to carbon-saving consumer behaviour caused by lack of confidence in individual actions. CoLAB aims to guide citizens to get to a point where they take a particular action: First, people need to acquire the necessary knowledge about a particular issue. Then people have to process this knowledge to form relevant values. Then they have to translate these values into intentions for action. Finally, people have to translate these intentions into real actions and also to realise that there is an opportunity to act;
- Barriers at local level to reach carbon neutrality by 2030: bureaucratic barriers to carbon neutral action; lack of citizen participation and proactivity; lack of funding/funding programmes or uncertain availability; time and economic constraints for people to use public transport; lack of walking and cycling paths, etc.; psychosocial barriers to using public transport; insufficient waste separation and quality of separated waste; slow behaviour change, including cultural barriers; ineffective waste prevention; availability of building materials and carbon neutral cars; unreasonably high investment costs.
Are cities building upon or part of a previous and/or existing activity?
CoLAB covers a range of learning processes relevant to cities aiming for climate neutrality: strategic and active learning, social learning, organisational learning, process and experiential learning. With the establishment of the Transition Team, CoLAB creates new learning paths within the city administration to overcome silo thinking, using the expert knowledge of the Cities of Mannheim, Muenster, Aachen in peer learning and transformation governance and the application of agile methods in co-creating/co-producing, as well as the experiences in Living Labs, Design Thinking workshops, education formats for stakeholders and citizens and trainings like citizen coaches to support other citizens in developing a climate-friendly lifestyle.
Which emissions domains will the pilot activity address?
Systemic transformation – levers of change the pilot activities will exploit
Stakeholder types that cities would like to engage in the pilot activities
Transferable features of pilot activities to a Twin City/ies
- Non-technical measures about how to enable measures towards a sustainable and climate-friendly lifestyle, a 1.5-degree target. CoLAB cities are very experienced in developing common solutions in pan-European peer-to-peer projects and take special care to ensure that the pilot activities are scalable and transferable through structured awareness-raising and systemic approaches and can thus be adapted for use in other cities. CoLAB does not focus on investigating direct emission reductions through technical measures, but on the very difficult assessment of non-technical measures to achieve climate neutrality.
- Methodologies on citizens and stakeholders’ engagement towards climate-friendly actions It is about closing the gaps between changing knowledge and real action in everyday life and making both actors and actions and their results visible.
This answer is not exhaustive and simply an indicative one.
Components of the transferable features
- Dissemination of best practices on influencing consumer-related CO2 emissions: How they can strengthen local commitment to climate action by building a Transition Team and through the Climate City Contracts, and how this leads to more sustainable and climate-friendly consumer behaviour.
This answer is not exhaustive and simply an indicative one.
What do cities want to learn from Twin City/ies?
- How does your city deal with emissions from consumer-related behaviour?
- Has your city knowledge in governing large-size interdisciplinary projects?
- How has your city united different stakeholder groups and mobilised them to act together?
- How does your city get stakeholders and citizens to make concrete commitments?
- Does your city have experience with the use of activating tools and instruments, such as nudging and gamification?
- How does your city incentivise the use of services such as tools or agencies?
This answer is not exhaustive and simply an indicative one.
