ClimpACT

Why is climate knowledge not turned into action?

The problem we want to explore: The barierrs for creating an impactful climate label

In a world with many possibilities for climate action, we want to focus on one specific action that individuals can take and dig deeper into the impact and psychology behind it. Consumer behaviour and economic spending play a significant part of climate impact. Yet, consumers are often overwhelmed or confused when it comes to “making the right choice”. In a world where climate labels are abundant, we want to investigate if and how a universal climate label would influence consumer behaviour.

Research Question

How does a uniform climate label influence consumer behaviour compared to price?

Latest Results

Since our initial literature review, we conducted expert interviews with Prof. Dr. Roosen (TUM) and Jeroen Berden (Ghent University) on climate food labelling and consumer behaviour, and ran a pilot 'BBQ' survey and label-matching booth game at the TUMJA Symposium to pre-test our approach. We are now finalising the design of our main Discrete Choice Experiment: participants will be shown food products varying in price, Fairtrade, EU Organic, Rainforest Alliance and PlanetScore labelling (plus a greenwashing control condition), and will choose between two products or an opt-out across ten choice tasks. A between-subjects manipulation will test whether educating participants about climate labels changes their purchasing decisions, allowing us to test causality rather than just correlation

At the TUM: Junge Akademie Symposium, we ran a pilot "Shop for your BBQ Party" booth game to pre-test our approach: visitors chose between food products carrying different price and label combinations across five categories (potatoes, meat, wine, ketchup, ice cream).

The clearest signal came from meat: the cheapest, unlabelled option (€6.99) received zero votes out of 17, while a pricier option combining an organic and animal-welfare label (€9.99 - about 43% more expensive) was chosen 12 times out of 17. Across all categories, animal-welfare labelling commanded the highest average price premium participants were willing to accept (€2.81), ahead of organic (€1.70), a climate score label (€1.67), Fairtrade (€1.63), regional origin (€1.55) and WWF certification (€1.36). Label sensitivity also varied strongly by product: for wine, the average accepted premium was €3.68, compared to just €0.62 for potatoes.

These results are preliminary and based on a small, non-representative pilot sample. However they point in a clear direction for our main Discrete Choice Experiment: labels can outweigh price in specific product categories, and how much depends heavily on what is being labelled.