Technology for Environmental Policy: Exploring Perceptions, Values, and Trust in a Citizen Carbon Budget App

Personal Carbon Allowances (PCAs) are a policy idea for reducing individual carbon emissions, originally proposed in the UK in the 1990s, but promptly discarded due to concerns about low public acceptability and technological limitations. Decades later, we face the global challenge of a worsened climate crisis, thus proponents of PCAs argue that they should be reconsidered. We conducted an online survey with 300 UK based participants, investigating the viability, trustworthiness, and public acceptance of a Citizen Carbon Budget (CCB) app to monitor and encourage carbon emission reduction from personal activities and the relation of responses to Schwartz’s Portrait Values Questionnaire. Our findings indicate that trust in using this kind of applications should not only be focused on their technical aspects but on the preconditions of trusting the implementation of this policy. Further, we found that holding stronger social values relate to a greater willingness to contribute to minimising individual carbon emissions and consequently to use the app across the board, including greater acceptance of automated features, and willingness to trust the app and stakeholders involved; these were not the case when holding stronger personal values. Various solutions may be needed to appeal to people with different values and leanings for mitigating climate change.