Abstract
Non-technical summaryThe exponential growth of humanity's resource consumption over the last half-century has led to ecological decline while people's basic needs have not been universally satisfied. The ‘doughnut economy’ and sustainable consumption corridor concepts have gained global attention, providing frameworks in which the maximum allowable environmental impacts and the minimum social levels acceptable to lead a good life establish a guiding pathway to meet human needs whilst remaining within the Earth's carrying capacity. We apply this thinking to the urban mobility sector in this article in an attempt to formulate a ‘safe and just space’ for urban mobility.Technical summaryThe theoretical and broad application of the ‘doughnut economy’ and sustainable consumption corridor concepts are lacking in implementation due to a limited understanding of sectoral thresholds. This study highlights the weakness of sustainable urban mobility indicator studies which often lack connections to ecological ceilings and social foundations and, thus, lack the ability to show if a mobility system is intergenerationally sustainable or not. Therefore, this study aims to bridge this knowledge gap and develop a mobility sector-focused sustainable consumption corridor. It does so by using a collection of concepts and associated indicators ranging from sustainable urban mobility, sustainable consumption corridors, ecological thresholds, needs theory and mobility social impacts to mobility poverty. The output of this study is an initial design of a mobility-focused sustainable consumption corridor with suggested themes and indicators to measure the relative performance of a region in relation to the material dimensions of the corridor accompanied by a discussion surrounding spatial, temporal and sectoral corridor-defining thresholds. This work provides a novel first step in the direction of sector-based sustainable consumption corridors which can aid in providing a transformational alternative to the status quo through the implementation of safe and just sectors.Social media summaryThis article applies the ‘doughnut economy’ and sustainable consumption corridors to the urban mobility sector. It provides a framework for evaluating urban mobility systems in terms of their ecological impacts (the ‘ecological ceiling’) and providing for human needs (the ‘social floor’), and for defining a ‘safe and just space for urban mobility’.
Highlights
Humanity’s exponential rise in energy use and mobility, among other socio-economic trends since the 1950s, has led to similar rates of exponential anthropogenic impacts on Earth Systems (Hibbard et al, 2006) such as carbon dioxide and methane atmospheric concentrations, surface temperatures, and forest loss (Ripple et al, 2021; Steffen et al, 2015)
Economic inequalities translate to unequal distribution of energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with a minor part of humanity being responsible for the major share of impacts (Hubacek et al, 2017; Kartha et al, 2020)
Makers, urban transport researchers, sustainability-focused citylevel initiatives and urban planners to incorporate the sustainable consumption corridor (SCC)/‘safe and just’ concepts into their work at the urban level, such as developing sustainable urban mobility (SUM) plans, urban decarbonization plans, and sustainability assessments in which both environmental and social aspects could be considered simultaneously, whilst connecting them, as in O’Neill et al (2018a, 2018b)
Summary
Humanity’s exponential rise in energy use and mobility, among other socio-economic trends since the 1950s, has led to similar rates of exponential anthropogenic impacts on Earth Systems (Hibbard et al, 2006) such as carbon dioxide and methane atmospheric concentrations, surface temperatures, and forest loss (Ripple et al, 2021; Steffen et al, 2015). Makers, urban transport researchers, sustainability-focused citylevel initiatives (such as C40 or the Covenant of Mayors) and urban planners to incorporate the SCC/‘safe and just’ concepts into their work at the urban level, such as developing SUM plans (with target setting performed with PBs in mind), urban decarbonization plans (where our framework would allow for disaggregated by sector assessments), and sustainability assessments in which both environmental and social aspects could be considered simultaneously, whilst connecting them, as in O’Neill et al (2018a, 2018b) Such perspectives and assessments could potentially be used by researchers to avoid O’Neill et al.’s (2018a, 2018b) fear of a ‘vanishingly thin ring’, in which living within an SCC becomes unattainable due to the escalation of materials and energy required by provisioning systems to satisfy human needs and wants, by allowing for more granular perspectives of sectoral system’s need satisfaction and associated ecological impacts. The framework developed in this work can provide guidance for other sector-based works, which has been suggested as an area for further research in the literature (Fuchs et al, 2021)
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