A User Study of Perceived Carbon Footprint

We propose a statistical model to understand people's perception of their carbon footprint. Driven by the observation that few people think of CO2 impact in absolute terms, we design a system to probe people's perception from simple pairwise comparisons of the relative carbon footprint of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2019-12
Main Authors: Kristof, Victor, Valentin Quelquejay-Leclère, Zbinden, Robin, Lucas Maystre, Grossglauser, Matthias, Thiran, Patrick
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Carbon
Colleges & universities
Environmental impact
Footprint analysis
Perception
Statistical models
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We propose a statistical model to understand people's perception of their carbon footprint. Driven by the observation that few people think of CO2 impact in absolute terms, we design a system to probe people's perception from simple pairwise comparisons of the relative carbon footprint of their actions. The formulation of the model enables us to take an active-learning approach to selecting the pairs of actions that are maximally informative about the model parameters. We define a set of 18 actions and collect a dataset of 2183 comparisons from 176 users on a university campus. The early results reveal promising directions to improve climate communication and enhance climate mitigation.
ISSN:2331-8422