Awareness, energy consumption and pro-environmental choices of Chinese households

Abstract

This paper contributes to the large volume of literature investigating the link between awareness and pro-environmental behaviours by combining theory and empirical evidence. We first develop a simple model incorporating agents′ environmental awareness in their decision-making processes, which helps us to understand the fundamental mechanism. Using household level data taken from the 2015 China General Social Survey (CGSS), we then empirically test a number of hypotheses derived from the theoretical framework. Our results confirm that the role of awareness is important in affecting household energy consumption and pro-environmental choices. Both accessibility and affordability of using energy improves social wellbeing in terms of health status. Awareness alone does not necessarily reduce energy consumption, but subjective factors can play important roles. Moreover, household′s subjective attitude can significantly influence decisions to purchase more energy efficient products and encourage pro-environmental choices. Policy implications can be drawn from these results that government should play a more active role in raising public awareness of sustainable development.