It is becoming increasingly clear that addressing pressing environmental challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss will require behavior our and consumption shifts. Various “greener” technologies, products and services (e.g. cultivated meat, second hand markets, the sharing economy), hold great promise for alleviating environmental burdens. Yet the efficacy of such alternative provisioning systems is often moderated by consumer behavior and the ways in which they affect consumption more broadly. In her talk, Dr Makov used different examples to demonstrate that the environmental benefits delivered by alternative provisioning systems often fall short of expectations, and that the tendency to employ simplistic assumptions about behavior may systematically bias research results. Given the importance of science-based targets, she highlights the urgent need to develop data driven, behaviorally informed assessment models and argues that alternative provisioning systems should be examined at the system rather than single unit level.
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