The phenomena of urbanization and climate change interact with the growing number of older people living in cities. One of the effects of climate change is an increased riverine flooding hazard, and when floods occur this has a severe impact on human lives and comes with vast economic losses. Flood resilience management procedures should be supported by a combination of complex social and environmental vulnerability assessments. Therefore, new methodologies and tools should be developed for this purpose. One way to achieve such inclusive procedures is by incorporating a social vulnerability evaluation methodology for environmental and flood resilience assessment. These are illustrated for application in the Polish city of Wrocław. Socio-environmental vulnerability mapping, based on spatial analyses using the poverty risk index, data on the ageing population, as well as the distribution of the areas vulnerable to floods, was conducted with use of a location intelligence system combining Geographic Information System (GIS) and Business Intelligence (BI) tools. The new methodology allows for the identification of areas populated by social groups that are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of flooding. C 2018 SETAC Original Publication: Integr Environ Assess Manag 2018;14:592–597. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ieam.4077
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Mobility hubs facilitate multimodal transport and have the potential to improve the accessibility and usability of new mobility services. However, in the context of increasing digitalisation, using mobility hubs requires digital literacy or even owning a smartphone. This constraint may result in the exclusion of current and potential users. Digital kiosks might prove to be a solution, as they can facilitate the use of the services found at mobility hubs. Nevertheless, knowledge of how digital kiosks may improve the experience of disadvantaged groups remains limited in the literature. As part of the SmartHubs project, a field test with a digital kiosk was conducted with 105 participants in Brussels (Belgium) and Rotterdam (The Netherlands) to investigate the intention to use it and its usability in the context of mobility hubs. This study adopted a mixed methods approach, combining participant observation and questionnaire surveys. Firstly, participants were asked to accomplish seven tasks with the digital kiosk while being observed by the researchers. Finally, assisted questionnaire surveys were conducted with the same participants, including close-ended, open-ended and socio-demographic questions. The results offer insights into the experience of the users of a digital kiosk in a mobility hub and the differences across specific social groups. These findings may be relevant for decision-makers and practitioners working in urban mobility on subjects such as mobility hubs and shared mobility, and for user interface developers concerned with the inclusivity of digital kiosks.
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To investigate the digital aspect of travel among vulnerable-to-exclusion groups, Customer Journey Mapping [CJM] was used to gain qualitative and quantitative in-depth knowledge of the experiences of elderly people, low-income citizens, wheelchair users, blind people and women. Due to COVID-19 the developed CJM method questioned participants about past trips over the phone or MS teams. This generated 36 interviews. Main outcomes: the elderly do not struggle with operating ticket machines or transport cards but are insecure about operating apps, finding information and rely on social ties. Low-income participants have good digital capabilities but suffer financial stress and prefer to pay cash. People in wheelchairs plan extensively in advance but receive limited support. Screen readers are crucial for blind people, and 69% of the women felt limited by safety; none of the men did.
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Because of its dependency on air transport, mitigating tourism greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions might become the most important challenge for the sustainability of the sector. Moreover climate change mitigation will be more and more in conflict with other sustainability objectives such as poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation through tourism. Indeed, tourism increasingly contributes to global GHG emissions. Transport, and in particular air transport, have the largest share in those emissions, with respectively 75 per cent and 40 per cent of the tourism 5 per cent share of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions estimated for 2005 (UNWTO et al. 2008). In terms of the actual contribution to climate change, measured in radiative forcing, the share of air transport is between 54 per cent and 83 per cent of tourism, depending on assumptions made on non-CO2 effects of aviation (Scott et al. 2010). Projections show a strong growth, with more than a doubling by 2035 (UNWTO et al. 2008). In a context where climate policies try to maintain global warming within the limit of +2 °C, this current tourism growth is apparently at odds with global emission reduction targets (Bows, Anderson and Peeters, 2007; Gössling et al. 2010).
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The Netherlands is known globally for its widespread use of bicycles and some call it a “cycling nation”. Indeed, many Dutch inhabitants own a bike and cycle frequently. Numbers show that 84% of the Dutch inhabitants from age 4 years and older own a bike. Those owners have an average of 1.3 bikes per person. This results in 18 million bikes in the Netherlands and 13.5 million bike owners.6 The Dutch use their bike as a means of transportation, but also for sports and exercise. Bike-use fits well in an active lifestyle and it is highly plausible that cycling is responsible for a large part of the daily physical activity in Dutch youth. It is estimated that Dutch people have on average a 6 months longer life expectancy attributable to bicycle use.7 It seems that the nation itself is well shaped to cycle: no large mountains, only a few small hills, and an extensive layout of cycle paths and routes in every city and village. In many urban areas separate cycle paths are very common. Our results show that many Dutch children use the bike as their way of transportation. It was demonstrated that active transportation is responsible for a large part of schoolrelated physical activity in Dutch youth.8 80% of 12-17 year-old children cycled three or more days to or from school/work.9 This resulted in an ‘A’ for the indicator active transportation (walking is included in the grade as well). Active transport is associated with increased total physical activity among youth.10,11 Also evidence is reported for an association between active transport and a healthier body composition and healthier level of cardiorespiratory fitness among youth. Although Dutch children accumulate a lot of daily physical activity through cycling, it is not enough to meet the current national physical activity guidelines of 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day. Even though cycling is an important component to the amount of daily physical activity, Dutch youth are not cycling to health
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Implementation of the United Nations Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (UN CRPD) requires countries to harmonise their legislative frameworks with it. This paper investigates the national legislative frameworks of four Asian countries to see the extent to which they provide support services in accordance with Article 19 of the UN CRPD. The UN CRPD requires persons with disabilities to have access to and choice and control over support services. To analyse the policy alignment with the UN CRPD, an analytical framework based on the Capability Approach (CA) was developed. The results show that most countries address support services, including assistive devices, only from the perspective of a social security measure for persons with disabilities living in poverty, failing to uphold the rights of those not meeting those eligibility criteria. However, while support services are inseparably linked to social security, they also are a right for persons with disabilities. Therefore, a paradigm shift is required in the approach of support services and the distributive systems of countries, from one that addresses persons with disabilities as those requiring care considered a burden, to one that considers them rights holders with equal opportunities, for which, support services are a pre-requisite.
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There are many different uses of the term sustainability as well as its derivatives, such as social sustainability, environmental sustainability, sustainable development, sustainable living, sustainable future, and many others. Literally, the word sustainability means the capacity to support, maintain or endure; it can indicate both a goal and a process. In ecology, sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse, robust, resilient and productive over time, a necessary precondition for the well-being of humans and other species. As the environment and social equality became increasingly important as a world issue, sustainability was adopted as a common political goal. The concept of sustainability the way most of us use it today emerged in the 1960s in response to concern about environmental degradation. This degradation was seen by some to result from the consequences of industrial development, increase in consumption and population growth and by others as poor resource management or the result of underdevelopment and poverty. Sustainability was linked to ethical concerns, typically involving a commitment to justice between generations involving issues such as equal distribution of wealth, working conditions and human rights, and possibly between humans and nonhumans, as discussed in chapters of Robert Garner, Holmes Rolston III and Haydn Washington. We can distinguish between different types of sustainability, for example between social (in terms of promoting equality, health, human rights), economic (in terms of sustaining people’s welfare, equitable division of resources) and environmental (in terms of sustaining nature or natural resources for humans and for nonhuman species) sustainability, as well as combinations of them. The study of sustainability involves multidisciplinary approaches, anthropology, political ecology, philosophy and ethics and environmental science. This type of multidisciplinary combination enables us to explore this new form of institutionalized sustainability science in a neoliberal age of environmental knowledge production and sustainability practice. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in "Sustainability: Key Issues" on 07/19/15, available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203109496 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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This article describes a European project which was aimed at improving the situation of persons with psychiatric or learning disabilities with regard to social participation and citizenship. The project took place in three countries (Estonia, Hungary and the Netherlands) and four cities (Tallinn, Budapest, Amersfoort and Maastricht). The project included research and actions at the policy level, the organizational level and the practice level. At the policy level, the framework of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations, 2006) and the European Disability Strategy (European Commission, 2010) were used to look at national and local policies, at the reality of the lives of those with disabilities and at the support that professional services offer with regard to participation and inclusion. The project generated a number of insights, recommendations and methods by which to improve the quality of services and increase the number of opportunities for community engagement. In this article, we present some of the lessons learned from the meta-analysis. Although the circumstances in each country are quite different with regard to policy, culture and service systems, it is remarkable that people with disabilities face many of the same problems. The study shows that in all three countries, access to services could be improved. Barriers include bureaucratic procedures and a lack of services. The research identified that in every country and city there are considerable barriers regarding equal participation in the field of housing, work and leisure activities. In addition to financial barriers, there are the barriers of stigma and self-stigmatization. Marginalization keeps people in an unequal position and hinders their recovery and participation. In all countries, professionals need to develop a stronger focus on supporting the participation of their clients in public life and in the development of different roles pertaining to citizenship
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Efforts to create age-friendly cities progressively intersect with goals for environmental sustainability. The older people’s beliefs, behaviours and financial aspects regarding environmental sustainability in their lives are an understudied topic and not well understood. Therefore, a representative survey was conducted using the psychometrically sound and comprehensive SustainABLE-16 Questionnaire. A total of 388 respondents, who were community-dwelling older people in The Hague, filled out the survey completely. Overall, the mean scores on the SustainABLE-16 for finance- and environment-driven pro-environmental behaviours, beliefs and the financial position among older people were positive for all districts of The Hague. Using the outcomes of the survey, a total of six unique typologies were identified through a two-step process combining hierarchical and k-means cluster analyses. These six typologies are 1 the staunch non-believers, 2 the finance-driven non-believers, 3 the everyday individuals, 4 belief-driven people with limited financial resources, 5 believing non-responders, 6 the affluent and engaging people. These six typologies each require different approaches from policymakers. Sustainabilityrelated policies should ideally focus on groups with high scores for pro-environmental behaviours but who have shortcomings in knowledge how to improve one’s everyday lifestyle and groups who lack the necessary financial means to live a more sustainable life.
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This paper contributes to the understanding of the end users’ needs and capabilities in digital mobility by presenting a set of personas developed using data from a population-representative survey conducted among 601 Barcelona Metropolitan Area (BMA) residents. The questionnaires were carried out within the framework of the DIGNITY project. The results show that large parts of the population cannot access digital technologies or lack the skills required to use them effectively. As a result, they are not able to take advantage of many digital mobility solutions. The personas in this paper thus present important information on the diversity of potential users, in a way that designers and other stakeholders can find inspiring. This can help them to create inclusive mobility ecosystem, that fit the users’ needs better, resulting in more people being able to use the solutions
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