Policies to alleviate climate change should look beyond technological advances and also focus on behavior change. This means encouraging the public’s choices by making demand- side mitigation solutions more available, accessible, visible, and desirable. Hence, traditional regulatory approaches such as bans or restrictions and economic incentive-based policies can now be accompanied by policies that aim to change behavior. Such behavioral policies have gained popularity in the last decade because they are less invasive of individual freedom of choice compared with more traditional policy instruments. In practice, behavioral economics interventions can include changes to the context of choice by modifying choice alternatives that are available, how accessible they are or how they are percieved. In addition, the application of behavioral knowledge to climate policies has been extended to analyze ways to increase public support for climate policies. Two areas of potential behavior change are discussed: residential energy use and food consumption.

Most collective dilemmas—that is, situations in which private interests contrast with collective interests—have an embedded intertemporal component in that they often imply that the rewards from defection are immediate but the rewards from cooperation are delayed and often accrue to people in the future. This also applies to carbon taxes since they imply additional individual costs for benefits which will mostly be enjoyed by future generations, which undermines their political support. 

In an experiment on a representative sample of 1,000 United States adults, we presented individuals with twelve alternative carbon tax formulations with varying start dates, temporal horizons of carbon abatement objectives and revenue uses. We find that public support is highest when individuals can pre-commit to policies that start a few years into the future and for policies that express their emission cuts objectives in more distant and ambitious terms —i.e. achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 as opposed to halving emissions by 2030. Individual temporal discounting, exogenously measured, account for large part of these preferences. These preferences are in contrast with the most efficient policy, which is the one that starts immediately and distributes equitably mitigation costs across time. 

We find two ways to realign preferences with it. First, the most efficient policy becomes politically feasible when the tax includes a dividend that is redistributed to citizens. Delivering an economic compensation at the same time of the individual costs of the tax neutralizes the effect of individual discounting and of the policy’s temporal context on tax support. Secondly, when the price of the carbon tax is adjusted upward to compensate for the opportunity cost of delaying its introduction, individuals start trading off its delay with avoidance of tax increases. 

Supervisor: Prof. Emilio Padilla Rosa

(Available online, 11/2021, http://hdl.handle.net/10803/674470)

Abstract: This thesis focuses on pro-environmental behavior (PEB), intended as any action that an individual undertakes or refrains from to minimize his/her negative impact on the environment and the climate. This thesis is articulated in three independent chapters. The red thread which connects these three papers is the focus on the relationship between environmental policy, individual decisions and time. The notions of time explored in this thesis span from considering i) time as a socio-cultural attitude –with certain nations being more future-focused than others–; ii) time as an individual preference that classify individuals as either impatient or forward-looking; and iii) time as the embedded, yet hidden contextual feature of environmental decision-making and policies. These chapters contribute to demonstrate that temporal preferences and the embedded temporal context of environmental choice contexts are relevant in determining individual behavior and the public approval of environmental policies. Individuals have a tendency to forego immediate costs, especially if those costs are justified by an intangible and temporally distant goal. But by gaining awareness of how time affect individual choices, we can craft decision environments that neutralize the effect of impatience without constraining the choices that are available to the individual.

with E. Padilla

(Available online, 09/2021, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2021.105563)

Abstract: Most environmental decisions involve intertemporal trade-offs, in that they require foregoing immediate gratification for the sake of future environmental quality. One such example is investing in energy efficiency, which entails an initial upfront cost in exchange for a future stream of energy and economic savings. Our experiment explores the role of individual temporal preferences in the decision to invest in energy conservation. We report results from a study on a nationally-representative sample of 2,010 United States adults. Participants chose between appliances that differed solely in price and operating costs. We manipulated the salience of energy costs and primed participants with future-oriented messages. Our treatments increased energy-efficient choices by 24 percentage points compared with the status-quo scenario. Present-oriented individuals are less likely to purchase energy-efficient appliances but loss-framed messages that highlight the opportunity cost of inefficient appliances diminish the effect of impatience on refrigerators choice.

The experiment was funded by the “Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences”, a program of the US National Science Foundation.

with E. Padilla

This paper previously circulated under the title "Pro environmental behavior: on the interplay of intrinsic motivations and external conditions", Department of Applied Economics at Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona Working Paper, 17.03 (Link to: Working paper)

Abstract: Pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs) have been linked in the literature to social norms, intrinsic motivation and external conditions. However, no study has jointly analyzed these factors on a cross-country dataset and given a holistic explanation of the variance observed in the adoption rates of PEBs across countries. Using a dataset measuring individual adoption of eight PEBs in the European Union’s 28 member states (in 2018), we econometrically test these three groups of factors on a wider scale. We assess the importance of intrinsic motivation as a dominant factor and show how differing levels of intrinsic motivation influence the effectiveness of external conditions, such as monetary incentives and green infrastructures. The results suggest that two-pronged policies, which take into account intrinsic motivation and external conditions, are needed to reach a high observance rate in the population in the short and in the long term. The wider significance of these results for policy is discussed.

Abstract: REDD+ projects promise the achievement of win-win deals where CO2 emission cuts and sustainable development in the global South can go hand in hand. The legitimacy of these projects ultimately depends on the size of the second win relatively to the costs of local communities. This paper focuses on one of the two funding mechanisms available for the payment of ecosystem services under REDD+ schemes to Southern countries – i.e., market-based solutions as opposed to using state-funds. I analyze the potential of market- based solutions emphasizing output legitimacy – more specifically the social equity implications of REDD+ projects and identify additional problems compared to state- funded solutions. I argue that market-based approaches may: i) produce projects with an emphasis on conservation objectives as opposed to developmental objective in the participating country; ii) exacerbate pre-existing inequalities in the distribution of income and resources; and that iii) the price volatility of carbon markets may prove detrimental to the long-term financial sustainability of the project, thus undermining the long-term feasibility of developmental outcomes. The implementation of REDD+ project requires in most cases the change, destruction and creation of new institutions which will likely be long-term. In a market-based scenario however, this is not matched by an equally long- term certainty regarding the developmental/compensatory activities involved as they are tied to the uncertain future of carbon markets. An example of market-funded project, the Kasigau Corridor project in Kenya is analyzed to illustrate the relevance of the hypothesis in a concrete case.