Household Preferences for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in Australia

As part of the fulfillment of its Kyoto Protocol obligations, the Australian Government is currently working towards the establishment of a national emissions trading scheme known as the 'Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS)'. The objective of the CPRS is to reduce emissions by 60 per cent of the 2000 level (108 percent of the 1990 level) by 2050 and to encourage the development and use of new emission reducing technologies. The implementation of the CPRS will affect virtually every Australian business and household as the prices of a wide range of goods and services are expected to rise.

The project aims to reveal whether Australian households, in the face of the substantial amount of uncertainty about the causes and consequences of climate change, are supportive of the proposed CPRS. Both contingent valuation and choice modelling, two widely used stated preference techniques, have been applied in a web-based survey in November 2008. The effects of two different forms of uncertainty, namely, the uncertainty associated with future climate change and the uncertainty associated with climate change policy effectiveness on household willingness to pay to avoid climate change, are being investigated under this project. The project, furthermore, aims to explore how these two distinct forms of uncertainty cause householders to be unsure of their preferences by reducing the levels of confidence they hold in their own decision.

This project is supervised by Professor Jeff Bennett.

Publications

• Confronting Uncertainty and Missing Values in Environmental Value Transfer as Applied to Species Conservation, Conservation Biology, 19 March, 2010
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