Investigating the impacts of air travellers’ environmental knowledge on attitudes toward carbon offsetting and willingness to mitigate the environmental impacts of aviation

Abstract

Several previous studies have explored air travellers’ willingness to compensate for their aviation carbon emissions or their willingness to pay for voluntary carbon offsetting programs. These studies have concluded that it is important to educate air travellers about the negative impacts of aviation on the environment. This study proposes two types of communication media and measures their effects on passengers’ knowledge about the environmental impacts of aviation. Then, travellers’ attitudes toward carbon offsetting and their willingness to offset their flights or change their travel behaviour are measured. Finally, a path model is estimated to analyse the effects of the various sources of knowledge on travellers’ knowledge about aviation and the environment, their attitudes toward the environmental impacts of aviation and their willingness to mitigate these impacts. The outcomes suggest that appropriate media could be adopted to enhance passengers’ knowledge of aviation impacts and the benefits of carbon offset programs, which could help passengers develop positive attitudes toward carbon offsetting and be more willing to offset their flights and change their travel behaviour. Not only does this study verify the relationships among knowledge, attitude, and behaviour (intention), it also has implications beyond academic research: it demonstrates that environmental education for air travellers should be prioritized.