Promoting Individual Climate Action Through Sustainable Transportation

Speaker: Leonard Lee

Professor of Marketing 

National University of Singapore

Time: 10:00-11:30, Oct.22^nd (Thursday), 2026

Venue：Siyuan Building, Room 624

MC: Prof. Yunlu Yin

Abstract:

As the world continues to combat against climate change, it is generally recognized that extensive car ownership imposes substantial societal costs, particularly in terms of land use inefficiency, economic burdens, and adverse environmental consequences. Moreover, car usage has a significant environmental impact, with land transportation accounting for approximately 20% of global carbon dioxide emissions (Bamberg and Rees, 2017). In this session, I would like to share the findings of two recent projects that examine factors and potential strategies that could reduce car ownership and usage, and encourage more sustainable forms of transportation, particularly public transportation and active mobility (e.g., walking, cycling). In the first project (Yuen et al., 2025), my collaborators and I found that perceived accessibility of public transport predicted the intention to give up car ownership, while an objective, spatial network-based metric (Public Transport Accessibility Level, PTAL) did not, underscoring the importance of incorporating perceptual factors into transportation policy to foster meaningful reductions in car ownership. In the second project (Salvo et al., under review), through a longitudinal randomized controlled trial, we tested the hypothesis that introducing personalized feedback on the environmental impacts of a consumer’s mobility choices, along with low-carbon rewards, can reduce the carbon-intensity of those choices and spill over to pro-environmental beliefs and attitudes, paving the way for a scalable fintech solution that integrates personal carbon tracking with real-time transportation choices.

Bio:

Leonard Lee is Lloyd’s Register Foundation Professor and Director of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk (IPUR), and Professor of Marketing at NUS Business School, National University of Singapore (NUS). His research investigates how emotional and cognitive factors influence consumer judgments and decision making, with applications in public policy domains such as healthcare and sustainability. 

Leonard received a BSc in Computer and Information Sciences from NUS, a MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a PhD in Management (Marketing) from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Psychology and the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, and a previous Associate Editor of Journal of Consumer Research (2015-22) and the International Journal of Research in Marketing (2014-15). He is also serving on the Editorial Review Boards of Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Letters, Risk Sciences, and Foundations and Trends in Marketing.