Climate action for (my) children

Helena Fornwagner () and Oliver Hauser

Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck

Abstract: Sustaining large-scale public goods, such as the environment, requires individuals to take action; however, motivating voluntary climate action (VCA) is difficult because decision-makers today do not stand to benefit from their investments. Here, we propose that parents invest more in VCA if their link to future generations-through their offspring-is made salient. In a novel lab-in-the-field experiment, we vary whether parents are observed during a VCA decision (i.e., investing in planting real-world trees) by their own child. In addition to a no-observer control, we run additional control conditions with an unrelated adult or an unrelated child observing the parent decision-maker. As predicted, VCA varies across conditions, with larger treatment effects occurring when a parent's own child is the observer. In subgroup analyses, larger treatment effects occur among more educated parents. As a result of this study, VCA across conditions led to 14,000 trees being planted, offsetting approximately 8% of participants' annual CO2 emissions for around four generations.

Keywords: voluntary climate action; intergenerational cooperation; parents; children; observability; lab-in-the-field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C99 D19 H49 Q51 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/c9821000/wpaper/2020-23.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Climate Action for (My) Children (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inn:wpaper:2020-23

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