Alternative scenarios of green consumption in Italy: An empirically grounded model

Any transition towards a more environmentally sustainable world will strongly depend on people's willingness to adopt the best available practices. We present here the Consumption Italy (CITA) model, an empirically grounded agent-based model designed to represent household consumption in Italy and to estimate the related greenhouse gas emissions under different environmental policy scenarios. We explored the effect of a price increase for high impact goods and services (e.g., because of the introduction carbon taxes) and of a change of agents' environmental concern (e.g., because of information campaigns). We found that both kind of actions can orient people consumption in the desired direction. However, their target and intensity should be carefully calibrated to produce significant effects at an acceptable cost.