Supporting Bottom-Up Human Agency for Adapting to Climate Change

Urban Commons and Collective Action to Address Climate Change

“…Suffice to say, we view urban green commons as key institutional arrangements for civil society groups to become more deeply involved in the resilience building of cities and local communities through combining climate-change adaptation with climate-change mitigation measures. Urban planners and policymakers should nurture such property rights arrangements for harnessing the climate-change agency of different civil society groups (Colding et al, 2020). As elaborated upon here, urban green commons can grant urban residents the right to actively engage in the management of both public and private land and this, in turn, contributes to environmental learning.…”

“…To create opportunities for civil society groups to act against climate crises, property rights regimes need to exist to promote such advancement. A strengthened socio-economic investment in urban green commons could help instigate climate-change adaption in the wider society and could, in the long run, be more effective for dealing with the climate crisis than solely focusing on achieving specific mitigation targets that often lack a socio-cultural context (Colding et al, 2020). As studies also indicate, socio-cultural factors often represent a strong motive for people to take up urban gardening (Oddsberg, 2011).…”

“…This is because humans as a group would benefit from taking action to deal with these problems, but few individuals have sufficient incentives to act alone (Nyborg et al, 2016). While much institutional inertia exists in effectively dealing with climate change (Colding et al, 2020), it is well worth asking what role collective-choice arenas could play for increased mobilization of civil society organizations to more effectively deal with the threats of climate change. Horelli et al (2015) show how self-organizing citizen initiatives, ranging from spontaneous events to longterm neighborhood developments aided by ICT, can have innovative impacts in urban life by activating new citizen groups.…”

Frontiers in Social–Ecological Urbanism

“…Hence, without extensive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, humanity will not be able to limit global warming by even 2 • C [32]. Hence, it is important that urban planners and policymakers help to prepare cities to buffer detrimental climate-change effects and also make sure that ecosystems are integrated into the design of urban systems not only for biodiversity conservation but to promote environmental learning in civic society through designs that promote human-nature connection [33].…”

“…On the contrary, urban planners are the ones that have the power to make decisions about the city due to the fact that "their profession operates on the higher levels of policy formulation" [96] (p. 1163). In turn, the political majority, as well as fiscal budgets, influence the decisions that planners can make, which can lead to institutional inertia and an inability to adapt to changing circumstances, such as to more actively address climate change [33]. As has long been recognized in resilience science, institutions represent key mechanisms for responding to climate change and for shaping societal change in desirable directions [2,97].…”