Long distances, weak infrastructure, sparse public transportation, and high land consumption rates – pursuing a climate-friendly lifestyle in rural areas often proves quite challenging. As part of the TRANSREAL project, researchers are working with local communities to develop solutions for two model regions in Austria.

In Austria, it is difficult for individuals to maintain a climate- and resource-friendly lifestyle, especially in rural areas: Access to education and health services often requires traveling long distances, and, in many cases, affordable housing is available only in remote areas, built on greenfield sites, and poorly served by public infrastructure – which results in increased resource consumption and a strong dependence on private cars.

Rural areas often lack practical solutions for climate protection, says Andreas Novy, head of the WU Institute for Spatial and Social-Ecological Transformations: “Research in this area is strongly focused on urban areas, partly because the vast majority of researchers live in urban areas themselves.”

To close this gap, a WU research team has joined up with researchers from the Environment Agency Austria and the Degrowth Vienna association to launch the TRANSREAL research project, funded by the Austrian Climate Fund as part of the ACRP program. The project acronym stands for “TRANSformative REALism,” and these two words encapsulate the goal of the project: it aims to identify realistic ways of achieving a climate-friendly transformation in rural areas by taking pragmatic steps intended to bring about long-term, sometimes radical, changes.

A story of two communities

For TRANSREAL, two Austrian model regions were selected that could hardly be more different: On the one hand, St. Johann in Tyrol, which takes in a lot of money from tourism but also lacks affordable housing due to strong demand for vacation homes. On the other hand, there is Pöllau near Hartberg in Styria, where building plots are cheap to buy but nearby jobs are few and far between and the public infrastructure is sparse.

From 2021 to 2023, the researchers took a close look at these two communities and worked with political leaders and citizens. “Interestingly, when you talk to young people in these places, they worry about very similar things,” says Andreas Novy. They find it increasingly difficult to walk the tightrope between affordable housing, a job not too far away, and childcare and education for their kids.

Instead of just developing technology-based solutions, it is therefore more promising to focus on issues related to the economics of everyday life (meeting day-to-day needs, from housing and food to healthcare and education) and aim for sufficiency (reducing the consumption of energy and resources while maintaining the quality of life). “If I can walk my child to kindergarten in the mornings, that’s a luxury many people in rural areas would love to have,” says Andreas Novy. This highlights an important criterion for the effectiveness of climate measures: They need a so-called co-benefit, i.e., a short-term additional eco-social benefit that satisfies some basic need.

In collaboration with the local communities, the researchers have developed green papers (i.e., proposals for climate measures to be implemented) for the two regions studied. In St. Johann, for example, this resulted in a citizens’ initiative for making use of “invisible” living spaces. The work in Pöllau resulted in a plan to set up a regional transformation agency for rural areas, with the goal of identifying new opportunities across municipal and district boundaries to counteract uncontrolled land consumption for residential buildings and remedy the lack of public transportation. “The communities living in structurally weak, rural areas often have no real lobby to stand up for their everyday interests,” Andreas Novy points out. “What is needed is regional lobbying that focuses on social and ecological issues.” The TRANSREAL project has laid the foundations for creating such a lobby.

Small steps towards big goals

“When today’s children are my age, Austria will look completely different,” says WU Professor Andreas Novy. He argues that what we will be seeing in the coming decades is nothing short of a revolution. “This term is a bit misleading, though, because it implies one big disruption. In fact, such far-reaching changes happen in many small steps. Even the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century actually spanned several generations.”

For Novy, it is clear that small, pragmatic steps are crucial for adapting to a future where new infrastructures and technologies will completely change our lives, where climate change and environmental degradation will be clearly noticeable, and where Europe will play a smaller role in the world. And these small steps must be firmly rooted in a transformative perspective, both in the city and in the countryside.

Detailed study results and further information

TRANSREAL project page on klimawandelanpassung.at (in German)