Are households with pro-environmental behaviours more likely to undertake residential energy efficiency audits? Evidence from Canada

Abstract

Residential energy efficiency improvements have a great potential to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Evidences suggest that there is an underinvestment in residential energy efficiency improvements, pointing out the existence of “energy efficiency gap”. To address this in Canada, the government has introduced home energy efficiency audit programmes since 1998, to encourage homeowners to get their homes audited professionally for energy efficiency and implement recommended upgrades. Using the 2011 and 2013 Household and Environment Surveys, this paper investigates whether household environmental behaviours have played roles in determining household participation in these audit programmes during the last 10 years. To the best of our knowledge, no study in Canada has examined the association between household participation in other pro-environmental activities and energy efficiency audit programmes. We find that pro-environmental behaviours such as water conservation, composting, recycling, participation in unpaid conservation activities, purchase of green goods, carrying own grocery shopping bags and lowering heating temperatures in winter nights are good predictors of household participation in energy efficiency audit programmes. Given that these other pro-environmental activities demonstrate environmental awareness of the households, our results suggest that besides the financial incentives, a more strategic and holistic approach to environmental programmes is both needed and possible when designing policies addressing residential energy efficiency gap.