Empirical analysis of Manager's perceptions towards aviation carbon emissions reduction

Abstract

Aviation professionals are key to the successful implementation of aviation climate strategy (ies), yet little is known about their perceptions, adequacy and readiness to act upon it. This represents an important gap in the body of knowledge such that we do not know how decision-makers will act towards meeting their climate obligation goals. Motivated by this lack of understanding we set to evaluate empirically their behavioral characteristics, in three steps: (1) We explored, via a survey methodology, their responses towards carbon emission reduction, consisting of informedness, risk, trust, benefit, perceived usefulness, attitudes, and intentions; (2) we then followed a factor reduction approach by performing exploratory factor analysis to validate the adapted constructs and items; and (3) the relationship between the final set of five constructs were then analyzed using the confirmatory factory analysis technique. All statistical metrics and model fit results met the criteria for significance. Key findings show that there is a strong support to the carbon emissions reduction initiatives, however, the level of uncertainty across all constructs is noteworthy. Moreover, benefit and perceived usefulness were statistically not relevant for decision makers. Finally, informedness was shown to have very strong and sinigicant relationship with attitudes, intentions and risk, but not with trust. vitae.