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arXiv · 1911.11658

A User Study of Perceived Carbon Footprint

Victor Kristof·Valentin Quelquejay-Leclère·Robin Zbinden·Lucas Maystre·Matthias Grossglauser·Patrick Thiran
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Abstract

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.

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Victor Kristof, Valentin Quelquejay-Leclère, Robin Zbinden, Lucas Maystre, Matthias Grossglauser, Patrick Thiran. 2019-11-26. A User Study of Perceived Carbon Footprint. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.11658

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