Scope
Sissa discusses the social dimension towards the full exploitation of ICT-related environmental benefits, focusing on the role that users, consumers or citizens can play in spreading and adopting pro-environmental ICT behaviour, answering to the question why incentives are important. Precisely, the active participative role of consumers promotes the collective situational awareness about environmental effects of actions, enabling green behavior and contradicting possible rebound effects, defined as a ratio of the lost environmental benefit to the potential environmental benefit.
Summary
- A basic assumption of the paper is that the awareness level (i.e. concern about and well-informed interest in a particular situation) drives the behaviour of customers, users, and citizens. Key driver for awareness is access to trusted knowledge, in order to allow people to understand the environmental impact of their own actions.
- Voluntary behavioural changes are usually driven by some kind of rewards. In some cases, adopting a new lifestyle is a reward by itself. On the other hand, the economic rewards by themselves sometimes are not strong enough to trigger a pro-environmental change. The goal is to shift from an individual dimension to a shared collective one, transforming social appraisal into the most effective reward. For example, personal carbon accounting for citizens would enable them to understand and manage their individual carbon footprint, while smart meters with related services could reduce household energy consumption. But their success largely depends on behavioural changes by groups of individuals, starting from empower individuals providing feedback, goal setting, and tailored information.
- The proposed model describes how behaviours can avoid rebound effects in the adoption of ICTs products or services, leveraging on the awareness level of the agents, making use of influence response functions – namely, deterministic threshold functions, according to which individuals adopt a new state based on the perceived fraction of others who have already adopted the same state. Five awareness levels are taken into account, from “blind” to “evangelist”. When the awareness level exceeds given threshold, the agent shifts from one type to another. Thresholds for the switch are different type by type, and the threshold to reach the highest level (corresponding to become an “evangelist”) is the highest one.
- Results indicate that agents should be made conscious of rebound effects occurring within their own realm. Policy makers, mainly at a local level, can foster sustainable behaviours by supporting behavioural change programs, promoting suitable, powerful, and friendly tools to help them in decision-making.
Relevance for EXIGENCE
Sissa‘s paper provides an answer to the question why incentives are important. In the context of EXIGENCE, we are going to focus both on the behavioral (including collective behaviour) and on the economic incentives, being in accordance to the paper’s line of thought. Precisely, we are going to focus both on the end-user (consumer) side (i.e. behavioral and economic incentives) and the upper stakeholders side (based on sharing the economic benefit that derives from energy and carbon efficiency, as well as, based on the green certification policies). Interestingly, both the end-users and the upper stakeholders incentives in the EXIGENCE concept would rely to a collective behaviour, relevant to the paper’s subject. Additionally, the ideas analysed in the paper would help us develop more effective incentives towards achieving the goal of energy and carbon efficient ICT services.
- Sissa, “An awareness based approach to avoid rebound effects in ICTs,” in ICT4S 2013: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability, ETH Zurich, Feb. 14-16, 2013, pp. 248-254.
