Flying rebound: consequences of the imposed flying sufficiency during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Political measures during the COVID-19 pandemic forced consumers to cancel flights, resulting in significant decreases of their individual greenhouse gas emissions. This paper introduces the concept of imposed flying sufficiency and asks whether this could lead to a flying rebound. Imposed flying sufficiency describes that external factors, such as political measures during the pandemic, force consumers to reduce their flights. The term flying rebound refers to the gap between the emissions that could be potentially saved due to flying sufficiency and the actualized emissions savings due to adjusted flying behavior. A major contribution of this paper is combining the economic mechanisms with moral-psychological aspects of rebound effects in an experimental study. In a 2 (with/without economic hint) × 2 (with/without ecological hint) between-subjects experimental study, this paper analyzes how the awareness of monetary savings and the awareness of ecological consequences affect consumers’ flying intentions. The study reveals an interaction effect of these two aspects: While awareness of the monetary savings will increase flying intentions, awareness of the ecological consequences will buffer this effect. Furthermore, the degree to which consumers feel flight shame, strongly moderates the economic and ecological hints’ impact. Finally, the paper provides implications for managers and policymakers.

Keywords:

• Rebound effects
• sufficiency
• COVID-19
• consumer behavior
• flight shame
• voluntary simplicity

Ethical approval

This study was ethically approved by the Ethics Committee of Kiel University, Germany, #ZEK-26/22.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as a part of the iReliefs project (grant FZK 01UT1706A) which belongs to the framework program Social-Ecological Research. The content of this publication lies within the responsibility of the authors.