Stimulating climate adaptive community initiatives.

Abstract

Community initiatives have an indispensable role to play in tackling climate adaptation, by their ability to increase the uptake of climate adaptation measures among households. This study focuses on increasing the uptake of green roofs among households specifically. Despite the potential of community initiatives in increasing this uptake, they often reach only a small portion of a neighborhood. Arguably, by enhancing membership numbers of green roof community initiatives, the overall success of green roof implementation in the Netherlands may be enhanced as an effective no-regrets adaptation measure. A novel framework of individual conditions has created a holistic overview of the relevant individual conditions that move people to participate in pro-environmental community initiatives. This study applies this framework to a case study in the Dutch city of Deventer. In doing so, this study takes a multimethod in-depth approach that has not been applied to this framework before. This results in an understanding of which individual conditions are most important in driving people to join a climate adaptation community initiative. The results show that all individual conditions of the framework were relevant and led to green roof initiative membership when all present. Yet, the most important individual conditions were found to be peer pressure, objective capacity, and sense of own responsibility. Accordingly the following aspects were highly influential in this case for driving green roof initiative membership: (1) citizens will need to have (access to) the required skills, competencies, information and knowledge, and resources to install a green roof, (2) citizens will have to feel like participating in such an initiative is part of the social norm of the group that they identify themselves with, and (3) they need to believe that they are responsible for addressing the issues caused by climate change. These findings were discussed with a selection of practitioners to assess their validity and generalizability, and were placed within the broader scope of environmental behavior literature. Recommendations for future research are provided, as well as recommendations for practitioners that aim to stimulate citizens to participate in climate adaptive neighborhood initiatives.