Developing transformative capacity through systematic assessments and visualization of urban climate transitions

Abstract

Transforming cities into low-carbon, resilient, and sustainable places will require action encompassing most segments of society. However, local governments struggle to overview and assess all ongoing climate activities in a city, constraining well-informed decision-making and transformative capacity. This paper proposes and tests an assessment framework developed to visualize the implementation of urban climate transition (UCT). Integrating key transition activities and process progression, the framework was applied to three Swedish cities. Climate coordinators and municipal councillors evaluated the visual UCT representations. Results indicate that their understanding of UCT actions and implementation bottlenecks became clearer, making transition more governable. To facilitate UCT, involving external actors and shifting priorities between areas were found to be key. The visual UCT representations improved system awareness and memory, building local transformative capacity. The study recommends systematic assessment and visualization of process progression as a promising method to facilitate UCT governance, but potentially also broader sustainability transitions.

Keywords: Assessment; Climate change; Governance; Transformative capacity; Urban Climate Transition; Visualization.

Fig. 1

Visualization principle with the eight thematic UCT areas and the three UCT process progression steps. Each thematic area is assigned a color. The thematic area is made up of three to seven key UCT activities according to the numbering in Table 1. The three concentric circles represent the UCT process phases; the inner circle represents the initiating phase, the middle circle the innovating phase, and the outer circle the scaling-up phase. Color intensity represents the scores for each area and process step set according to the evaluation system (Table 2). Darker color shades indicate more progress. Inaction is represented by a white zone

Fig. 2

Visual representations of a overall UCT process progression, b internal spread, i.e., UCT progression is reaching the municipal organization and c external spread, i.e., UCT progression is also reaching relevant non-municipal actors in the three cities. N.B. The color shades represent how far the transition has progressed within each process progression phase: innovation (inner circle), experimenting (middle circle), and scaling-up (outer circle) and key activity