GREEN BUILDING LITERACY AND HOUSING CHOICE

Kenneth Donkor-Hyiaman, Frank Gyamfi-Yeboah, Eric Tudzi and John Bugri

AfRES from African Real Estate Society (AfRES)

Abstract: Green buildings are part of the global strategy to achieve sustainable development. Efforts towards this goal are however hampered by the lack of awareness and high illiteracy about green building. Focusing on the youth, this paper measures the level of green building literacy among Ghanaian tertiary education students, how it differs according to their demographics, and its relationship with their housing choice. Following a comprehensive literature review, we used a structured online questionnaire survey to gather data from 763 Ghanaian tertiary education students. Following statical tests, the study analysed the dataset principally using mean scoring, Chi-square test and regression techniques. The results suggest that most university students have no or basic knowledge in green buildings. This low level of green building literacy is attributable in part to their demographic features including age, gender, level of education, level of study, employment status, income level of respondents, and whether the person had previously lived in a house with green features. Further analyses show that male students and built environment students have higher knowledge about green buildings and are more likely to have lived in or are currently living in a building with green features, and also more likely to choose a house with green features in the future. Policy-wise, the study shows that educating the youth about green buildings could alter their housing outcomes and preferences in favour of sustainable ones and hence, contribute to achieving Sustainable development goal 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities.

Keywords: Green Buildings; sustainability; Sustainable Development Ghana; Green Building Literacy; housing choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://afres.architexturez.net/doc/oai-afres-id-2022-026 (text/html)
https://afres.architexturez.net/system/files/afres-2022-26.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:afr:wpaper:2022-026

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in AfRES from African Real Estate Society (AfRES) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Architexturez Imprints ().