The Marginal Impact of Emission Reductions: Estimates, Beliefs and Behavior

Monday, 15 June 2026, 3pm to 4.15pm

An important driver of climate change inaction is the belief that individuals cannot have any tangible impact on climate change through their own actions. Currently available statistics are not suited to systematically assess or challenge this belief. In this paper, I derive the marginal impact of emission reductions – the effect of reducing emissions by 1 tonne of CO₂ (tCO₂) – on physical climate change outcomes, document important misperceptions, show how they affect behavior, and derive policy implications. Using climate models, I find that the impact of reducing emissions by 1 tCO₂ is thousands of liters less glacier ice melting, several additional hours of aggregate life expectancy, and multiple m² less vegetation undergoing ecosystem change. Subjects underestimate these figures by orders of magnitude. Moreover, their mental model is inconsistent with climate models. First, they misperceive climate change as a threshold public goods game. Second, they incorrectly assume that the marginal impact increases when others also reduce their emissions (strategic complementarity). Providing subjects with the climate scientific findings causally increases perceived self-efficacy, intentions to reduce own emissions, and real donations to reduce global emissions. The misperceptions and treatment effect are consistent with a mental model of threshold thinking, which predicts positive overall emission reductions of information provision in equilibrium. Providing information about the marginal impact is a cost-effective demand-side mitigation strategy. The information can also serve as a catalyst for other climate policies by reframing their benefits and challenging arguments against unilateral action that are based on threshold thinking.

Speaker(s): Christoph Semken

Series: SSEE Environment and Resource Economics Seminar

Venue: Manor Road Building - Seminar Room C - Seminar Room C Manor Road Building Manor Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 3UQ United Kingdom

Department: Economics (Department)