Designing an end-user carbon account scheme as a climate policy tool in the EU context

Details

Supervisors

Van den Broeck, Goedele ; Adant, Ignace

Faculty

Faculté des bioingénieurs

Degree label

Master [120] : bioingénieur en sciences agronomiques, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Climate change threatens human societies and the ecosystems around them. Aware of the urgency, public decision-makers, experts, and other stakeholders are developing public policies aimed at reducing emissions, limiting the global warming and, already, preparing, with more or less means, adaptation to less favourable living conditions. To coordinate the actors, putting a price on carbon is a well-accepted strategy. But this is not enough. Measures that will apply at different scales need to be worked out in details. Among the tools designed, carbon account policies rely on the allocation of carbon units to individual end-users. The principle is simple: households must return carbon units during their purchases, according to the carbon footprint of the goods and services they buy. The availability of carbon units would be reduced each year to be in line with climate change mitigation targets. The design of new public policies is a difficult exercise. To increase the effectiveness of climate policies, it would be particularly useful to test their acceptability by citizens before implementing them. This study assesses the preferences of Belgian citizens for an end-user carbon account scheme and the acceptability of different designs. Its organization is as follows. First, a review of scientists’ and experts’ proposals is presented in order to introduce the reader to the main public policy instruments. Second, an original end-user carbon account proposal is developed, following past proposals and developments by scientists and experts. It is a policy that could be deployed on European territory. Third, to assess its acceptability by citizens, a choice experiment is designed. The characteristics of this new public policy that are selected for the experience are: the level of carbon price, the potential volatility of price, the provision of tailor-made carbon advice, and the presence of higher carbon price for people emitting beyond a certain threshold of annual emissions. The results indicate that a majority of participants is willing to accept the end-user carbon account scheme. Among the respondents, preferences for carbon account attributes are heterogenous. Three groups of respondents can be distinguished. The first group, the smallest, was not interested to enter a carbon account policy and was composed of people that were globally older and with higher emission levels. The second and third groups were both willing to accept a carbon account scheme and expressed both interest in carbon pricing mechanisms that reduce volatility. They prefer more tailor-made carbon advices. Finally, the third group preferred to have no higher carbon price when going higher than a threshold, while the second group expressed a high interest for the concept of higher carbon price above a certain limit of annual emissions. While reminding the limits of the analysis resulting from the sample used, the conclusion stresses the interest of this innovative proposal and the first-ever choice experiment applied to an EU carbon account policy proposal and, finally, the importance of bringing together generations of citizens with different preferences as to the characteristics that will guarantee this tool a strong acceptability.

HERA Award Sustainable Economy 2022

Citations

• APA

Van der Cam, A. (2021). Designing an end-user carbon account scheme as a climate policy tool in the EU context.