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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 10: Transport, Regional and Urban Dynamics

SOE 10.7: Talk

Wednesday, March 24, 2021, 14:20–14:40, SOEa

Policy and Innovation Spreading on the Global City Network — •Niklas Kitzmann¹, Jonathan Donges¹, Xuemei Bai², Pawel Romanczuk³, and Ricarda Winkelmann¹ — ¹Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany — ²Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University, Australia — ³Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany

In the much-needed global sustainability transformation, cities may play an important role. Being among the prime drivers of GHG emissions, as well as of sustainable policy innovation and adoption, cities are known to learn from each other to reduce, prepare for and react to the coming environmental changes. In this way, they can be conceptualized as nodes in a globe-spanning learning network, potentially yielding insights into the social tipping dynamics that are so urgently needed to control the human impacts on the Earth System.

Here, we aim to identify whether network-based contagion effects are dominant in sustainability policy adoption by cities. An attempt is made to approximate the inter-city innovation spreading network using empirical data of the global air traffic network and other city-to-city connections. We analyze the spreading of several municipal policies and innovations related to sustainability, such as the implementation of Bus Rapid Transit public transport systems, as contagion processes on these inter-city networks. Surrogate data methods and a dose-response-contagion approach are used to identify network-spreading-correlations. We then investigate the nature of the spreading process by attempting to reproduce it using generative models.