Project Summary

The project aims to create a dashboard for assessing the Societal Readiness Level (SRL) of transport decarbonisation innovations. Users can complete a questionnaire and receive their SRL result, along with recommendations for activities to increase their innovation’s readiness. The dashboard offers self-service tools for SoRA activities, including stakeholder and value mapping, visioning and backcasting, and co-design. By utilising this dashboard, users can gain insight into the current SRL of their innovation and take actionable steps to improve its readiness for societal implementation.

Project Achievements

SoRA focuses on improving and de-risking efforts to decarbonise transport. The IPCC and the UK Climate Change Commission agree that 40-70% of the green transition need to come from social change. Worldw ide £150 trillion has been pledged to tackle carbon emissions, £1.4 trillion in the UK. How ever, social change is difficult to leverage and many projects fail, often at huge cost. SoRADASH helps funders, investors, local authorities, solution developers, designers, planners, individuals, communities, and researchers to increase the societal readiness of projects designed to decarbonise transport. Designing SoRADASH through extensive stakeholder engagement and collaborative design is a major achievement of the project. Through involvement of sustainable transport consultants, small and large design and master-planning firms, local authority sustainability officers, Third Sector Groups, youth and community climate advocates, w e have enabled greater competitiveness, better products and services, and less risky investment of time and resources. External parties like NESTA have contacted us to discuss SoRA. Researchers at Taiw an’s National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University use SoRA in case studies in Taipei and Sydney.

Conclusions

Assuming 27% of the £1.4 trillion pledged for a green transition in the UK is spent to tackle the 27% share of transport emissions, it would seem worthwhile to invest at least 0.1% on increasing the societal readiness of decarbonising transport projects. Leveraging such a social turn needs support through a standard systematic methodology that boosts creativity and social justice. SoRAand SRL are designed to complement and challenge innovation that has, so far, shown an over-reliance on Technology and Market Readiness Assessment, with many costly failures. Investing just 0.1% of investment in developing societal readiness could be transformational.

Next Steps

SoRADASH has already been live tested in the context of pilot projects. Stakeholders have told us that it has proved ‘critical for development of better vision-led planning’ and ‘management of dissent’. It is also ‘really good to get really quality output, w ithout spending a heap of money you don’t have’, it enhances actionability and accountability in terms of social justice and social impact. To take SoRA to the next level, w e need to develop SoRA tools or ‘instructables’ that are more stand-alone and develop a service-model that can support consultancy. There is also scope for further research on research questions like: How does measurement of societal readiness levels change public procurement of solutions designed to decarbonise transport? We are seeking follow -on funding through a range of different routes, including further research. The TRIG programme has provided resources for an intense sprint of development form TRL3 to TRL6, access to an amazing netw ork of fellow innovators, and invaluable leadership, guidance, and support through the maze of opportunities.