Despite the COVID-19 pandemic having become endemic, ‘back to normality’ is not something that everybody can expect. The increase of digitalisation in our daily lives, the uncertainty about supply chain and economic conditions, and the introduction of new habits and values during the pandemic time have challenged the notion of “typical travel patterns” and raised questions on the assumptions underlying our transport models. In parallel, the impacts of climate change in recent years are becoming more and more apparent and knowledge on how we can identify the triggers that lead to a profound, transformative behaviour change beyond what we can see with our traditional approaches is critical to achieve our carbon net-zero target. 

Whilst the uncertainties of user behaviours and transport supplies make travel demand modelling more difficult than ever, the interdisciplinary knowledge and advancement of methodologies and technologies enable us to explore new approaches in order to understand and forecast human decisions better. This knowledge would be critical in promoting a sustainable behavioural change, with the right disruptive methods and interventions, and in creating accessible and inclusive climate-neutral cities.

Sonja Haustein is a psychologist and professor in human behaviour at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Her research aims at understanding and predicting behavioural choices to inform interventions towards green, healthy and inclusive transport. Sonja has a long-standing interest in the interactions of the individual with the social, spatial and technological environment as factors influencing behaviour change in transport. In her ERC project ‘URGENT’, she and her interdisciplinary research group use unique longitudinal multi-methods design to better understand the mental mechanisms involved in behaviour change, uncover questions of causality, rebound and spill-over.

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Mei-Po Kwan is Choh-Ming Li Professor of Geography and Resource Management and Director of the Institute of Space and Earth Information Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Kwan has made ground-breaking contributions to research on environmental health, human mobility, transport and health issues in cities, and geographic information science (GIScience). She discovered the uncertain geographic context problem and the neighborhood effect averaging problem. Her recent projects examine the health impacts of individual environmental exposure (e.g., noise, air pollution, green space), the protection of geoprivacy via the development of a Geospatial Virtual Data Enclave (GVDE), and the space-time dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Martin Raubal is Professor of Geoinformation Engineering at ETH Zurich. He is also a Steering Committee member of the Center for Sustainable Future Mobility at ETH and a member of the Future Resilient Systems Management Committee at the Singapore-ETH Centre. Martin’s research interests focus on spatial decision-making for sustainability, more specifically he concentrates on mobile Geographic Information Systems & Location Based Services, analysing spatio-temporal aspects of human mobility, spatial cognitive engineering, and mobile eye-tracking to investigate visual attention while interacting with geoinformation and in spatial decision situations.

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