Management of Sustainable Development 2012, Week 1

Management of Sustainable Development 2012, Week 1

Changing individual behaviour to reduce carbon emissions

Rachel Howell (School of GeoSciences)

Rachel will discuss, mainly from an environmental psychology perspective, what we know about the drivers and barriers to personal behavioural change and climate change action. She will then explain a specific policy proposal aimed at energy demand management: Personal Carbon Allowances.

Essay topics:

1. Behaviour change
Many campaigns to promote pro-environmental behaviour have focussed on providing information about environmental problems. What are the drawbacks of such campaigns? How might pro-environmental behaviour be better promoted?

A few readings to get you started:

Darnton, A., J. Elster-Jones, et al. (2006). Promoting Pro-Environmental Behaviour: Existing Evidence to Inform Better Policy Making. London, Defra. (online)

Kollmuss, A. and J. Agyeman (2002). Mind the Gap: why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behavior? Environmental Education Research 8(3): 239-260.

Lindenberg, S. and L. Steg (2007). Normative, Gain and Hedonic Goal Frames Guiding Environmental Behavior. Journal of Social Issues 63(1): 117-137.

Steg, L. and C. Vlek (2009). Encouraging pro-environmental behaviour: An integrative review and research agenda. Journal of Environmental Psychology 29: 309-317.

Whitmarsh, L. (2009). Behavioural responses to climate change: Asymmetry of intentions and impacts. Journal of Environmental Psychology 29(1): 13-23.

Particularly the first two and Steg and Vlek provide a good starting point for further reading.

2. Personal carbon allowances

Critically evaluate the proposal for personal carbon allowances as a means of reducing individual and household direct carbon emissions. You can consider issues such as effectiveness, efficiency, acceptability, cost, and any other relevant arguments. You might find it helpful to compare the policy to other options such as upstream trading or carbon taxation, but you do not have to.

A few readings to get you started:

To explain the idea:

Fleming, D., 2007. Energy and the Common Purpose: Descending the Energy Staircase with Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) See

Fawcett, T., 2004. Carbon Rationing and Personal Energy Use. Energy & Environment 15, 1067-1083 (on WebCT)

Some evaluations:

Bird, J., Lockwood, M., 2009. Plan B? The prospects for personal carbon trading. Institute for Public Policy Research, London. (online summary)

Defra, 2008a. Synthesis report on the findings from Defra’s pre-feasibility study into personal carbon trading. (online)

Dresner, S., Ekins, P., 2004. The Distributional Impacts of Economic Instruments to Limit Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Transport. PSI Research Discussion Paper 19. Policy Studies Institute, London. (online)

Fawcett, T., 2010. Personal carbon trading: A policy ahead of its time? Energy Policy 38, 6868-6876.

Papers from the special issue of Climate Policy that have been put on WebCT (because not available through the library)

Plus you could look for papers about the efficiency of quota versus price-based instruments; about carbon literacy/capability etc. N.B There is very little about PCAs published in journals, but a Web of Knowledge search would turn up a couple more, and there are other reports online that can be found through a search engine.