Greening Household Behaviour: The Role Of Public Policy

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Household consumption patterns and behaviour have an impact on stocks of natural resources, environmental quality and climate change. This is expected to increase significantly in the future. In response, governments have introduced a variety of measures to encourage people to take into consideration the environmental impact of their purchases and practices. These may include environmentally related taxes, energy performance standards for homes, carbon dioxide emission labels for cars, and financial support to purchase solar panels, among others. Nevertheless, understanding and influencing household behaviour remains a challenge for policy makers. This publication presents the main results and policy implications of an OECD survey of more than 10 000 households in 10 countries: Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. It offers new insight into what policy measures really work, looking at what factors affect people's behaviour towards the environment in five areas: water use, energy use, personal transport choices, organic food consumption, and waste generation and recycling. Greening Household Behaviour: The Role of Public Policy is an invaluable resource for all those interested by the challenging questions of what promotes "greener" lifestyles, from policy makers to individual citizens.

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Greening Household Behaviour THE ROLE OF PUBLIC POLICY Greening Household Behaviour THE ROLE OF PUBLIC POLICY This work is published on the responsibility of the Secretary-General of the OECD. The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of the Organisation or of the governments of its member countries. Please cite this publication as: OECD (2011), Greening Household Behaviour: The Role of Public Policy, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264096875-en ISBN 978-92-64-06362-4 (print) ISBN 978-92-64-09687-5 (PDF) The statistical data for Israel are supplied by and under the responsibility of the relevant Israeli authorities. The use of such data by the OECD is without prejudice to the status of the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and Israeli settlements in the West Bank under the terms of international law. Corrigenda to OECD publications may be found on line at: www.oecd.org/publishing/corrigenda. © OECD 2011 You can copy, download or print OECD content for your own use, and you can include excerpts from OECD publications, databases and multimedia products in your own documents, presentations, blogs, websites and teaching materials, provided that suitable acknowledgment of OECD as source and copyright owner is given. All requests for public or commercial use and translation rights should be submitted to [email protected] Requests for permission to photocopy portions of this material for public or commercial use shall be addressed directly to the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) at [email protected] or the Centre français d’exploitation du droit de copie (CFC) at [email protected] FOREWORD Foreword H ousehold consumption patterns and behaviour have a profound effect on stocks of natural resources and the quality of the environment. The importance of taking the “demand side” into account is a key lesson arising from the OECD’s Green Growth Strategy (www.oecd.org/greengrowth). OECD governments have introduced a wide variety of measures to encourage people to take enviro