Scope
The paper investigates the effectiveness of information, goal setting, and feedback in encouraging individuals to reduce the carbon footprint of video streaming, through a seven-week online intervention.
Summary
Seger et al. present a seven-week online intervention study to assess the effectiveness of information, goal setting, and feedback on reducing the carbon footprint of individual video streaming behaviours. Information provision was performed in two steps. The participants watched a video that focuses on the ecological consequences of Internet use in general and video streaming in particular. Then, the participants were provided action knowledge that contained six tips to reduce GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions: using the laptop or smartphone instead of the smart TV, reducing the resolution, deactivating the AutoPlay function, not streaming on more than one device at the same time, streaming music on audio instead of video platforms, and watching videos together on the same screen. Goal-setting intervention involved asking participants to reduce their GHG emissions associated with video streaming by 20% compared to the baseline. Feedback was implemented by communicating the total carbon impact expressed in grams CO2e and illustrated by translating it into car-driving kilometers.
The study found that information provisioning together with self-monitoring resulted in considerable pro-environmental behaviour change, reducing CO2e by more than 19%. In contrast to expectations, goal setting and feedback did not yield additional benefits to information provision. The authors identify two reasons that a knowledge-based intervention appears to be sufficient.
First, digital activities such as video streaming have, up to the time that the study was performed, been paid little attention by campaigns promoting pro-environmental behaviour, indicating that there is a need to raise awareness of the consequences of such activities for the climate. Second, the knowledge-based intervention included both system- and action-related information. Additionally, the participants recorded their streaming, thus conducting self-monitoring which overlaps the effects of goal setting and feedback, in addition to information provision.
Relevance for EXIGENCE
The conclusion that simple information provisioning might be sufficient, or at least achieves the highest gains, provides evidence that simple incentive schemes can achieve the most gains in carbon footprint reduction for video streaming. Nevertheless, the behaviour of users may change in the future as a result of pro-environmental awareness of the impact of video streaming. Hence, a possible direction for the work in EXIGENCE is to reflect different awareness levels to the different users’ willingness to reduce the video quality in favour of higher carbon reduction, as suggested by the authors of (T. Hoßfeld et al., 2023).
- T. Seger, J. Burkhardt, F. Straub, S. Scherz, and G. Nieding, “Reducing the Individual Carbon Impact of Video Streaming: A Seven-Week Intervention Using Information, Goal Setting, and Feedback,” Journal of Consumer Policy, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 137–153, Feb. 2023.
