Speaker
Description
Food choices, especially those involving animal-based products, have become more than a dietary concern, they are a critical step towards climate change mitigation. Reducing the consumption of animal-based foods in developed countries is now widely accepted as a key part of mitigating climate change (Parlasca and Qaim 2022; Kwasny, Dobernig, and Riefler 2022). Yet, one barrier is that individuals are often uninformed about the impact of dietary changes on climate change (Macdiarmid, Douglas, and Campbell 2016; De Boer, De Witt, and Aiking 2016) and underestimate their carbon footprint from food consumption (Camilleri et al. 2019; Cologna, Berthold, and Siegrist 2022).
Applying carbon footprint labels to food products is the most direct approach in attempting to influence consumer food choices (Camilleri et al. 2019). Yet, carbon labels are not always effective and remain poorly understood (Grunert, Hieke, and Wills 2014; Rondoni and Grasso 2021). In addition, people are less willing to contribute to climate change if the required lifestyle changes are seen as too drastic (Andre et al. 2024). People generally like to continue eating the food they know and enjoy following the norm (Bonnet et al. 2020). Moreover, there is resistance to eating less meat (Macdiarmid, Douglas, and Campbell 2016). In this context, carbon offsetting may provide an alternative opportunity to reduce emissions from food consumption.
In this paper, we explore people’s willingness to offset carbon emissions as a way to reduce residual emissions from animal-based food consumption. Specifically, we study the causal effect of providing information about greenhouse gas emissions from dairy and meat consumption on people’s carbon offsetting choices and compare this to emission information for car journeys and no information provision.
We use a pre-registered online survey experiment with a representative sample of 600 Irish citizens. The sample is representative of age and gender, and the sample size was defined using a power analysis. The survey experiment is based on a within-between-subject design, which consists of two donation choices. Initially, participants are endowed with €20 and can allocate any amount to a carbon sequestration project run by EcoTree, a European company that conducts carbon offsetting projects in Europe and elsewhere. After the baseline donation, participants are randomly allocated into one of three treatments (i.e. dairy, meat, or car) or an active control. The treatments provide participants with information on greenhouse gas emissions from the production and consumption of dairy and meat, and traveling by car in Ireland. The active control is similar in length but provides information on tea consumption in Ireland with no information on greenhouse gas emissions. Participants are then asked to make a second donation. One of the two donations is randomly selected and applied for payment.
As part of the pre-registered analyses, we will test whether the information provision on animal-based foods (i.e., meat and dairy) increases the donations in comparison to the absence of information (i.e., active control). We will also test for differences in donations dependent on whether the greenhouse gas emission information originates from animal-based foods or car traveling. For this comparison, we do not pre-register a directional effect. In addition, we will run exploratory analyses.
[The full data collection is set to occur in March 2024. The results presented below are from a pilot data session using only the active control condition and are purely exploratory.]
Findings from pilot data involving only the active control indicate that participants donate €7.55 on average. In addition, we find no differences between the first and second donations, which confirms that the active control does not impact donations. Looking into the determinants of the donation, we find no heterogeneity among participants in terms of socio-demographic characteristics. However, participants with greater levels of concern and awareness of the consequences of climate change donate more. Similarly, participants who trust and see carbon offsetting as efficient also donate more. These results show that greater carbon literacy is linked with a higher willingness to pay for carbon offsets. In turn, this aligns with our pre-registered hypotheses that information on greenhouse gas emissions from animal-based foods will increase carbon literacy and lead to a higher willingness to pay for carbon offset.
