Francesca Cellina
F. Cellina - Driving social change for the energy and climate transition
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Francesca Cellina graduated in Engineering for the Environment and Territory from the Politecnico di Milano and in 2023, in the same city but at Bicocca University, she earned a doctorate in Analysis of Social and Economic Processes. Since 2009 he has worked for the Institute of Applied Sustainability to the Built Environment, where he is now head of the sustainability and society sector. Here she puts her expertise at the service of energy and climate transition, focusing on the social aspects of change, such as the evolution of social behaviors and practices and the role of participatory processes in the transformation of habits towards more conscious lifestyles.
The energy and climate transition also passes through changes in the habits of individuals. What are the main obstacles holding people back from adopting more sustainable lifestyles?
Unfortunately, the scientific literature suggests that there are no single measures capable - on their own - of activating change and consolidating it over time. The success stories act over long periods of time and are based on the synergetic combination of different types of intervention. Information is certainly needed, but this is not enough. Do people know how to implement change? And can they actually implement it? That is, do they have the resources and means to implement it? Do they know how to do it and can they really do it? Let's take cycling as an example. For many people, the perception of reduced safety is a brake on its use. The presence of cycle lanes, or the improvement of road safety, therefore becomes a prerequisite for cycling. Infrastructural (or, in some cases, technological) interventions are therefore necessary, accompanied by training to ensure that everyone is actually able to implement the desired change. Then, we need to work on social conventions, on changing what is considered the “right and normal” behaviour expected of members of our society. Cultural change is therefore just as necessary as technological and infrastructural change.
The systemic approach to the challenge is indispensable. Which disciplines dialogue to support awareness-raising initiatives?
It certainly depends on the awareness-raising initiative. With my team, which is already interdisciplinary because we are environmental engineers, social researchers, spatial planners and statisticians, we often work in collaboration with colleagues in information and communication technology. We have developed several digital tools (apps and online platforms) to promote behavioural change, often working together with the public authority and citizens to ensure that they better meet their needs. Some of these focused on changing mobility choices or energy consumption at home or at school, such as the GoEco, Social Power or enCompass projects; others focused on creating new opportunities that would enable real behaviour change. For example, we created the MixMyRide app that integrates public transport and car-pooling, offering precisely a new mobility service. In the absence of a service like MixMyRide, it is objectively difficult for many people - even those who are very sensitive to the issue - to give up their cars, because public transport cannot offer the flexibility and ubiquity they need.
In the Ticino context, which collaborations between political authorities, companies, associations and research institutes have yielded significant results?
I consider many of the initiatives I mentioned above to be examples of success: we developed the tools, had them used by the population and studied their effects, using the most rigorous analysis methods possible. The results suggest that they are often effective in achieving the goals of saving energy or changing the use of means of transport. However, our field experiments have shown that the effect we find in the short term tends not to be maintained in the long term: the effect is rarely maintained in the long term, i.e. months (or years) after the use of these tools. That is, there remains the problem of how to ensure that the change is lasting and above all “irreversible”: how to ensure that we do not go back to our previous habits? This is still an open question, not only for my team, but in general for the scientific community dealing with the transition to sustainability. A cultural change on a larger scale is needed, one that goes far beyond the participants in our experiments. How to facilitate the “normalisation” of these behaviours is what the scientific community has yet to understand.
The latest is the Treeps survey analysing the travel and holiday habits of people living, studying or working in Ticino. What are its objectives?
With Treeps, we want to understand the choices of those who like to travel, focusing in particular on how far the holiday destinations are and the means of transport used to reach them. We have developed an app that proposes destinations that are closer and can be reached by public transport, i.e. by train or bus, and, also thanks to a chatbot, invites people to share “sustainable travel” experiences with the app's user community and on social media. We will invite half of the people participating in the survey, chosen at random, to use this app: will they make more sustainable trips than those who have not used the app? By means of questionnaires, we will monitor the participants over a whole year, to estimate the effect of Treeps. If it encourages more sustainable holiday choices, we can work with the canton and municipalities in the future to integrate Treeps functions into existing apps that are popular among the population. We would also like to initiate new collaborations with tourism promotion organisations in Switzerland and neighbouring countries to encourage the (re)discovery of their tourism potential by the population.