Use Infrastructures and the Design Evidence Link (DEL) for Urban Climate Mitigation: An Ex Ante and Ex Post Verification of User-Centred Mitigation Impacts

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🔬研究者:Provides a novel analytical framework (DEL) for designing and evaluating demand-side mitigation interventions, with cross-case evidence and validity conditions.

🏢実務担当者:Offers a structured protocol for configuring low-carbon interventions and verifying their impacts, useful for urban planners and sustainability teams.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need for coordinated policy packages that address behavioral, economic, and governance barriers to demand-side emission reductions.

Achieving urban climate neutrality and interim mitigation targets requires rapid demand-side emission reductions, yet current user-centred interventions remain fragmented, are often concentrated on low-impact actions, and rarely provide a traceable basis for comparing outcomes, validity conditions, and equity implications across contexts. This paper reframes demand-side mitigation as a design problem of “use infrastructures”: integrated configurations of communication, product-technology, services, interaction, and governance that make low-carbon choices practicable within everyday routines. We introduce the Design Evidence Link (DEL) as a traceability device supporting ex ante configuration (selection and orchestration of levers) and ex post verification (monitoring, attribution of outcomes, and trade-off control). Through a design-led comparative analysis of nine international cases in high-impact sectors (household energy, ground mobility, food systems, and circular economy/materials), we derive and consolidate a shared extraction and coding protocol that links determinants (barriers and enablers) to design requirements and decision-grade metrics (carbon impact, adoption, continuity, and equity), explicitly qualifying uncertainty and evidence levels. Cross-case results show that effective interventions rely less on isolated information and more on coordinated action packages that reduce cognitive and economic frictions, enhance data credibility through standards and accountability, and embed follow-up mechanisms that support behavioural continuity. DEL also surfaces recurring validity conditions and failure modes (digital exclusion, trust erosion, rebound, and lock-in), translating them into operational criteria for policy and design. Compared with behaviour-change or theory-of-change framings, DEL focuses on the observable orchestration of integrated conditions of use and on the explicit grading of evidence. It should therefore be read as a structured analytical–operational framework for ex ante and ex post assessment, whose transferability remains conditional on source quality, contextual prerequisites, and the limits of the selected cases.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3390/su18073587first seen 2026-05-05 19:11:40