Advancing neighbourhood climate action: opportunities, challenges and way ahead

Abstract

Cities are emerging as key sites for action on climate change. Within cities, urban neighbourhoods are increasingly taking leadership in addressing local effects of climate change through mitigation and adaptation programs. Bottom-up action on climate change through neighbourhood scale programs presents opportunities in terms of getting the community to partner and participate in climate action. However, neighbourhood scale programs often run into challenges in terms of limited participation, impact and resources to keep the programs running. In this paper, we advance the literature on the opportunities and challenges of neighbourhood scale climate action. We do so by analysing three neighbourhood scale programs that address climate action in Canada and in Australia. We adopt online workshops as a research methodology where volunteers from the three programs share their experiences of opportunities and ways of overcoming challenges of neighbourhood climate action. Our findings illustrate that collaborative governance between the city and the neighbourhoods, incremental community building and consolidating local resources are important for advancing neighbourhood climate action. This paper adds to the thin body of knowledge on neighbourhood scale climate action and presents ways of overcoming the challenges of bottom-up climate action.