Study On Factors Influencing Air Travellers’ Behavior For Carbon Emission Reduction

Climate change and greenhouse gas emissions has been a key issue to human beings sustainable development. Tourism has recently attracted attention as an important contributor to climate change through its greenhouse gas emissions. If tourism industry doesn’t take any mitigation measures, it will be very likely that tourism will become a major contributor to global carbon emission. The tourism industry uses energy in several activities, it was estimated that 75% of CO2 emissions were from tourism transportation, and air transportation accounted for 40% of all CO2 emissions. Based on the background of carbon reduction of tourism industry, this paper chooses air travelers’ carbon reduction behavior as research perspective, and to examine related influencing factors by theoretical model study.Based on literature review, this paper put forward theoretical model of air travelers’ carbon reduction behavior. This model was formed by including personal norms into the theory of planned behavior. There were five variables which might influence air travelers’ carbon reduction behavior in the model. The five variables were attitude toward the behavior, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, behavior intention, personal norms. Besides, this paper differentiated air travelers’ carbon reduction behavior into two kinds to study the validity of theoretical model from the perspective of behavior costs.Questionnaire survey of over 376 was conducted in Shanghai Pudong International Airport. Descriptive statistical analysis, reliability and validity, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling analysis were applied in the use of SPSS 22.0 and AMOS 21.0. Results showed that the theoretical model had ideal structure and could predict air travelers’ carbon reduction behavior very well. Behavior intention had direct influence on carbon reduction behavior and was determined by attitude toward the behavior, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, personal norms at the mean time. Personal norms and perceived behavioral control had direct impacts on carbon reduction behavior as well, however, these were rather instability. This study didn’t find better performance of theoretical model for high-cost behavior, which indicated that behavior cost might not influence the performance of model.