There is increasing awareness of the key role that consumers play in creating a more sustainable future. While both regulations and eco-efficiency improvements have been proposed as levers to solve environmental challenges, a significant focus of recent research has been on understanding the environmental impacts of consumption and identifying the opportunities to reduce environmental impacts through changes in consumption patterns. This research agenda, covered by the field of sustainable consumption, has applied the tools and techniques of industrial ecology, in particular attributional life cycle assessment, to the quantification of individual and household environmental impacts (often called footprints) and the identification of sustainable consumption patterns. However, in practice, reducing environmental impacts through changes in consumption requires demand-side interventions - actions taken by individuals, companies, governments, or organizations that shift consumer demand. These interventions may be such things as a consumer deciding to adopt greener products, a company labeling their product with environmental information, a restaurant nudging consumer's towards meatless options, or the development and marketing of a novel product alternative. Understanding the potential of demand-side interventions to achieve desirable environmental outcomes requires a detailed understanding of how interventions affect consumer behavior and, as a result, the environment.
The scope of this dissertation is captured by a simple question: what role does consumer behavior play in determining the environmental consequences of demand-side interventions? Such a question might seem simple on its face, or perhaps not wholly important. However, how consumers respond to interventions is critical in understanding a solution's environmental merit. Economic activities are linked together into an interdependent system by consumers. As such, interventions that affect consumers ripple throughout the economy in unexpected ways, determining the environmental consequences of the interventions along the way. While this is true broadly, these effects are particularly salient when the proposed environmental benefits are demand mediated - that is, the anticipated environmental benefit is solely a function of a change towards more sustainable consumption patterns. Such interventions are rampant, and their environmental consequences relatively unexplored. The extent to which information that affects consumer choices, interventions that affect the costs and benefits of particular household behaviors, or even new product introductions cause environmental benefits or damages is a result of how consumer demand responds to the particular intervention. What follows is a set of three essays that illuminates the importance of considering consumer behavior in the context of environmental sustainability and provides key contributions to both the theoretical and empirical understanding of the relationship between consumer behavior and the environment.
The first chapter of this dissertation, The Role of Prices in Determining the Environmental Impacts of Product Choice, explores how a consumer's choice between product alternatives affects his aggregate carbon footprint. The extent to which any product choice reduces environmental impacts is, at least in part, determined by the alternative streams of consumption that the consumer faces in his decision. His preferences, constraints, and beliefs, as well as the decision-making context determine these paths. Here we focus specifically on the role that prices and the consumer's budget constraint play in determining the environmental impacts of product choice. We present five case studies where commonly proposed environmental behaviors are found to cause additional environmental impacts as a result of price differences across salient choices.
The second chapter, Curbside Recycling Increases Household Consumption, uses econometric methods of causal inference to better understand how consumers respond to curbside recycling programs. Historically, recycling has been justified on environmental grounds by the comparing the environmental impacts of recycled product to the impacts of similar products made from primary materials; Since, in general, recycling products is less environmentally intensive than producing them from virgin sources, recycling interventions have been proposed as an environmental solution. In practice, the extent to which recycling interventions affect the composition and level of consumption is important in understanding the resulting the environmental consequences. We leverage variation in the regional adoption of curbside recycling programs in North Carolina (from 1999-2019) to compare similar communities with and without recycling programs, finding that household solid waste generation (and, thus, material consumption) increases by 7-10% in the presence of curbside recycling. This increase in consumption likely reduces the environmental benefits of recycling programs.
The third chapter, Demand-driven Conservation, takes a broader perspective on demand-side interventions. We focus on understanding to what extent demand-side interventions can lead to conservation outcomes. We concern ourselves with the general case of demand-driven conservation by developing a new statistic called the demand elasticity of conservation, which represents the percentage change in a desired conservation outcome that results from a percentage shift in demand. We build a theoretical bio-economic model of a fishery to analyze the potential for demand-driven conservation in the context of marine fisheries, then parameterize the model for 4,713 fish stocks to estimate the demand elasticity of conservation for 27 fish product classes. We then perform a case study to investigate the extent to which cell-based seafood, a novel food product in development, may lead to conservation benefits for wild bluefin tuna stocks.
Together, these chapters provide the basis for a deeper understanding of sustainable consumption, expand and solidify the methodology for evaluating the environmental merits of demand-side interventions and develop key insights about when and where consumer behavior can be leveraged for environmental gain. In all, this work is just the beginning of a larger conversation. It is my hope that it spurs additional research on consumer behavior and the environment, that it inspires readers to think deeply and think differently about how to make environmental choices, and that it opens the door just a fraction more to the possibility of an ecologically sound future.
