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We conducted an experiment to explore how teenagers can become energy conservation stewards at home. In this experiment, called the Dial Down Challenge, we equipped adolescents with knowledge about electricity and water conservation behavior during a six-week online program with guided activities to be completed at home. We tested whether teenagers could transfer this knowledge to other members of their household and induce attitudinal and behavioral change. We found that knowledge, awareness, and motivation for saving energy increased among both teenagers and their parents. We also found that participants’ perceptions of their agency increased across teenagers and parents. In terms of intergenerational exchange, we found that parents increased their reliance on the information provided by their children but reduced their perception of their children’s agency in changing energy conservation practices at home. In other words, participants realized that energy conservation was more challenging than anticipated. Overall, the results from this small experiment demonstrate the potential of a program like the Dial Down Challenge for increasing energy conservation awareness and knowledge within the household. However, we also find that this type of experiment requires active social interactions and is difficult to implement during a pandemic when these interactions are limited.

Disclosure of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) metrics remains almost entirely voluntary, resulting in incomplete and unstandardized data that makes it difficult for stakeholders to collectively compare firms and assess their impact. To align reporting, in 2020 the World Economic Forum (WEF) proposed a framework consisting of metrics it asserted were already commonly used by firms. But little data supports this claim, as there is no comprehensive evaluation on firms’ disclosure rates on these metrics. This project aims to fill this gap. We selected 300 of the largest U.S. public companies from the Fortune 200 and S&P 500 lists because they’re high-revenue firms and have a substantial impact on global social and environmental trajectories. And these firms have more resources to devote to reporting ESG metrics. Under four pillars — Governance, Planet, People, and Prosperity — WEF describes 21 core metrics and 34 expanded metrics. This research focuses on these 300 companies’ disclosure related to the 21 core metrics, many of which have multiple subparts. For this analysis, we divide the 21 core metrics into 74 submetrics. We source data primarily from the text of sustainability reports (54.9%), firms’ websites, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) public filings (37.5%) or the Compustat database, and the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) (7.6%).

We analyze multiple subsidy programs for residential energy efficiency upgrades from 2010 to 2015 using electricity billing records of more than 11 million households in Southern California. We find that adopting these upgrades reduces overall electricity usage by 4%. However, there are significant differences in savings between upgrades. Pool pump and refrigeration upgrades generate the largest savings (13% and 6%, respectively). Lighting and HVAC retrofits generate the smallest savings (less than 1%). Some upgrades lead to concerns of rebound effects, such as dishwasher and clothes washer upgrades, and building envelope upgrades. Program impact varies by time of the year and building type. Furthermore, we find that energy savings are inconsistent with the engineering estimates. These results indicate that policy makers should consider the allocation of program funding not simply based on engineering projections but also based on measured electricity consumption such as those described in this study.

Air pollution has a significant impact on health but is often invisible to the naked eye. Real-time air quality information can help people take action to protect their health. However, little is known on how to most effectively frame air quality information to promote public health. We conducted a field experiment to study people’s engagement with real-time air quality information provided through a smartphone application (app). We tested 12 different messaging strategies on both intent to engage with air quality information (through a survey), and actual engagement with air quality information tracked through the app in response to the messaging strategies. Our results, based on 835 survey respondents and 2,740 app users, show that intent to engage and actual engagement differ. Overall, users’ demographics were the most important predictor of engagement with messages. This research demonstrates the significance of testing messaging strategies through field experiments rather than through surveys, and the importance of targeted messages.

The state of the planet calls for large-scale sustainability transitions involving systemic adoption of markedly better environmental and social practices. The objective of this symposium is to better understand the role of corporations in promoting such systemic change. We present four case studies—representing diverse industries and change mechanisms—-to investigate corporate leadership in sustainability transitions. The cases examine a wide range of mechanisms used by corporations to progress toward sustainability, such as political coalition building and information strategies through eco-labels, socially responsible investing, and the public statements of CEOs. In this introduction, we discuss the challenges associated with both achieving and studying systemic change, explain the rationale for a case study approach, describe the findings from the case studies, and draw some general conclusions on the mechanisms by which firms may be able to lead, or at least participate in, systemic change in the different phases of sustainability transitions.

Corporate sustainability has gone mainstream, and many companies have taken meaningful steps to improve their own environmental performance. But while corporate political actions such as lobbying can have a greater impact on environmental quality, they are ignored in most current sustainability metrics. It is time for these metrics to be expanded to critically assess firms based on the sustainability impacts of their public policy positions. To enable such assessments, firms must become as transparent about their corporate political responsibility (CPR) as their corporate social responsibility (CSR). For their part, rating systems must demand such information from firms and include evaluations of corporate political activity in their assessments of corporate environmental responsibility.

The data presented in this article are related to the research article entitled: "Information strategies for energy conservation: a field experiment in India" (Chen et al., 2017) [1]. The availability of high-resolution electricity data offers benefits to both utilities and consumers to understand the dynamics of energy consumption for example, between billing periods or times of peak demand. However, few public datasets with high-temporal resolution have been available to researchers on electricity use, especially at the appliance-level. This article describes data collected in a residential field experiment for 19 apartments at an Indian faculty housing complex during the period from August 1, 2013 to May 12, 2014. The dataset includes detailed information about electricity consumption. It also includes information on apartment characteristics and hourly weather variation to enable further studies of energy performance. These data can be used by researchers as training datasets to evaluate electricity usage consumption.

Little is known about the effectiveness of information strategies on energy conservation in developing countries. In this study, we conduct a field experiment in an apartment complex in India to test how information about electricity usage impacts the electricity consumption of urban middle class households. Our results, based on fifteen-minute electricity readings over an academic year, show that nonmonetary messages that framed electricity consumption in terms of environmental and health impacts were more effective than messages emphasizing the monetary savings of reducing electricity consumption. Households in the environmental/health group accessed the online energy-monitoring dashboard more frequently and reduced their electricity usage by 18.4% relative to the control group. Households in the monetary group did not significantly alter their usage. These results about revealed preferences are contrasted with stated preferences disclosed in a survey of urban Indians who describe money, not health, as the main motivation for energy conservation. Our findings have important implications for the development non-monetary strategies for energy conservation in developing countries.

We propose a model that identifies the configurations of relations between environmental practices and other management practices that can improve employee performance, measured as labor productivity. To test our model, we use the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) methodology, which allows us to demonstrate empirically how different configurations of management practices, including environmental practices, quality management systems, teamwork, and interorganizational relations, contribute to work systems in ways that increase labor productivity. Our results, based on data from 4,975 employees from 1,866 firms, show that environmental practices are associated with higher labor productivity only when they are combined with other management practices.

Eco-labels emphasize information disclosure as a tool to induce environmentally friendly behaviors by both firms and consumers. The goal of eco-labels is to reduce information asymmetry between producers and consumers over the environmental attributes of a product or service. However, by focusing on this information asymmetry, rather than on how the label meets consumer needs, eco-labels may send irrelevant, confusing, or even detrimental messages to consumers. In this article, the authors investigate how the environmental signal of eco-labels interacts with product characteristics such as brand, quality, and price. In a discrete choice experiment, the authors examine consumer response to two similar eco-labels for wine, one associated with a quality reduction and the other not. The results show that respondents preferred both eco-labeled wines over otherwise identical conventional counterparts when the price was lower and the wine was from a lower quality region. However, they preferred conventional, more expensive wine from a high-quality region. This preference indicates that respondents not only obtain some warm glow value from eco-labeled wine but also possibly interpret eco-labeling as a signal of lower quality. This relationship held across both types of eco-labels, meaning that consumers did not understand the difference between them. This research contributes to the literature on information disclosure policies by highlighting important elements for effective eco-labels. These elements include consumer awareness and understanding of the eco-label, and consumer willingness to pay for an eco-labeled product. The results emphasize the need to create eco-labels that communicate clearly both the environmental attributes and the private benefits associated with them.