A transdisciplinary approach to improving urban air pollution

In Berlin, Germany, new laws have been passed in the past 5 years seeking to transform the city’s mobility infrastructure to be climate neutral and environmentally friendly. Given Berlin’s size, history, and diverse governance structures, these new mobility measures (e.g. new bike lanes, temporary street closures) are typically implemented piecemeal in heterogeneous districts that makes measuring their individual environmental impacts challenging. Using the transdisciplinary research approach of the Research Institute for Sustainability of the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS), the planning and execution of several measurement campaigns, and the subsequent uptake of results into policymaking, was conducted with local stakeholders in the Berlin Senate Department for the Environment, Urban Mobility, Consumer Protection and Climate Action (SenUMVK). To assess individual measures’ impacts on local air quality, a metric important to policymakers’ assessments of their success, before and after measurements of nitrogen oxides (NO_x) and particulate matter (PM) were conducted. This talk will focus on the transdisciplinary approach to research and how such an approach can address air pollution and climate change synergies, but also how such an approach facilitates uptake of research results by decision-makers.