Abstract
This paper investigates the effects of behavioural interventions on energy conservation in naturally ventilated offices. Our aim is to inform building managers, environmental consultants, and social scientists on the effectiveness of low-cost, easy-to-implement interventions aimed at reducing energy waste and carbon emissions in a setting where individuals do not have direct financial gain and have low awareness of the environmental impact of their actions. The interventions consist of three types of emails with different information content aimed at encouraging recipients not to leave the windows of their office open overnight or during weekends. Our results show that these interventions are effective in promoting energy savings, as the percentage of windows left open by treated occupants is typically halved compared to a control group. We find that the impact of the treatment is stronger when we provide specific information about the energy waste of the building where the email recipients work or when we show them how their behaviour differs from that of their peers. Moreover, our results show that positive behavioural changes are still observed a few weeks after the interventions are terminated, thus suggesting that such interventions do not act only as temporary “cues” which are easily forgotten by recipients.
Highlights
Market-based policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon cap-and-trade programs or subsidies to renewable energies have proved to be very effective.1 the political resistance to the use of some of these approaches and the financial cost involved in sustaining them have pushed in recent years, academics and policy makers to☆ We would like to thank Beatrice Avanzini for her excellent research assistance and seminar participants at the University of Southampton for useful comments
With this second type of email, we sought to assess whether there is a stronger drive to energy conservation if the problem of energy waste is presented in a context that is relevant to the recipients and, at the same time, participants are informed about the progress of the intervention over time
Our results show that the impact of Local Mail (LM) is stronger than General Mail (GM) for treated offices in Building 1, while we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the impact of LM is the same as the impact of Personalised Mail (PM) for both Building 1 and Building 2 & 3
Summary
Market-based policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon cap-and-trade programs or subsidies to renewable energies have proved to be very effective. the political resistance to the use of some of these approaches (as in the case of the market for trading carbon emissions in the US) and the financial cost involved in sustaining them (as in the case of the subsidies for solar and wind energy) have pushed in recent years, academics and policy makers to. In this respect, Carrico and Riemer (2011) note that “feedback that is removed from the specific behaviour, either temporally or in unit of analysis (i.e. aggregated across many behaviours and/or individuals) will not provide the type of information that allows an individual to gauge whether his or her actions are having the desired effect” Building upon these findings, the key contribution of our research is to investigate the effectiveness of environment appeals and social norms in the workplace in a setting where (a) the intervention refers to a single task, simple and easy to implement (i.e. close the window of your office), (b) feedback is at individual level and delivered at relatively high frequency (two emails a week) and (c) the link between the behaviour to be changed and the impact on energy consumption is less obvious..
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