Attitude and Behavioral Intention towards Reducing Carbon Footprints in the Environment: an Empirical Study of Fiji

: Global warming is a worldwide issue but it is mostly developing countries like Fiji and other island nations such as Kiribati that are being affected. While citizens of most economies do not have a say in legislations and policies of their countries towards reducing emissions , the only realistic way of having a say can be done through their behaviour towards reducing carbon footprints. This study seeks to study attitudes of educated Fijians towards environmental issues, particularly issues brought by tourism and Fijians intentional behaviour in reducing these impacts by minimising their carbon footprints. It concludes that tourism is not regarded as a high impact environmental issue owing to Fijians either lack of awareness or an intentional lack of awareness. Awareness campaigns in Fiji are generic in nature, as most mentioned behaviours were unspecific meaning most Fijians know what to do but do not know how.


Introduction
Carbon emissions in Fiji are mostly by liquid fuel (88.09% of total emissions) and solid fuel (5.11% of total emissions) in year 2013 (World Bank, 2013). Carbon emissions are mostly due to activities by individuals through the use of liquid fuels in cars. Carbon emissions, therefore, can be reduced by changing attitudes and behavior of individuals towards the environment they are living in. On individual level, attitudes shape behavior as stated by cognitive consistency theory which means that person's behavior is mostly consistent to that of his attitudes. In this paper, we study the attitudes of Fijians towards environmental issues based on impacts and their behavioral intentions toward reducing carbon footprints. A recent report on Fiji's Tourism Development Plan states that for conservation of biodiversity to be fully appreciated and actively pursued at national and regional level, WWF should support efforts to mainstream conservation into national and sectoral plans, policies and programs. The Strategic Environment Assessment (SEA) of Fiji's Tourism Development Plan also exemplifies this approach. The objective of the SEA is to assess the environmental and sustainable development impacts of the plan to enable the Ministry of Tourism and its partners to make Navneel Shalendra Prasad, Asa Romeo Asa, Xu Hongyi Attitude and Behavioral Intention towards Reducing Carbon Footprints in the Environment: an Empirical Study of Fiji 22 ISSN 1849-5664 (online) http://researchleap.com/category/international-journal-of-management-science-and-business-administration ISSN 1849-5419 (print) International Journal of Management Science And Business Administration Vol 1. No 5. April 2015., pp. 21-30 future plans sustainable. The SEA indicated a major need for the present policy to be reviewed in order to protect Fiji's environment and people. There were concerns about Fijians benefiting economically from tourism (WWF). Thus, the main aim of this study is to understand the attitudes of Fijians towards environment issues and to analyze the issues of these attitudes and how they can be curbed to reduce individual carbon footprint. Attitudes towards Tourism as an environmental issue also add relevancy to this study as it is the major foreign exchange earner for Fiji. The report above indicates that the tourism development plan could have detrimental effect on the Fijian environment and its people, therefore, serving the purpose of this study which is to evaluate and understand attitudes towards issues which can be reduced on individual levels. This is necessary because every Fijian does not have a say on whether to review the development policy but with understanding attitudes and curbing behaviors, they can contribute towards a more sustainable Fiji regardless of the development policies.

Literature
Ajzen's (1985) Theory of Planned Behavior states that attitudes toward behavior, subjective norms and behavioral control collectively shape an individual's behavioral intention and behavior. This theory works best where situation-specific cognition influences specific behavior (Bamber, 2003). Policies often have little impact on consumer behavior without education and enforcement. Anti-littering campaigns work because individuals can see the direct link between littering behavior and visual environment impact yet, campaigns like ‚Live greener by reducing carbon emissions‛ are unlikely to succeed owing to the call to be too amorphous (Mckercher andPrideaux, 2011). Staatset al., (2004) state that voluntary pro-environment behavior change should target small number of specific behaviors where cause and effect can be seen. Many researchers (Anable, Lane &Kelay, 2006;Ester, Simoes, &Vinken, 2004;Kollmuss, & Agyeman, 2002) acknowledge the existence of a gap between awareness and actions. Asafew studies have shown that more informed individuals feel less personally responsible and less concerned about global warming than less informed individuals (Kellstedt, Zharan, &Vedlitz, 2008). McKerchera and Prideaux (2011) review that information overload and choice overload might be another cause of this gap as consumers get bombarded by so many messages about environment issues from diverse range of sources of incomplete or conflicting information that puts them in a state where they do not know where or how they should act. Situations like these may lead to ‚Green fatigue‛ (Greenberg, 2008) where enthusiasm for change falls over time.  The review of the literature helps us construct the objectives of this study. The first objective was to study the attitude of educated Fijians towards different environment issues including Tourism. Tourism acts as a key part of this study as it is the major foreign exchange earner for Fiji. WWF, in its report, warns Fiji of ‚irreversible environmental damage and tension between tourist developers, landowners and local communities‛ and questions Fiji's further tourism expansion plan. Therefore, studying individual attitudes towards tourism as a part of environment issue shows the level of awareness on the negative impacts of tourism in Fiji. The second objective of this study is to categorize behavioral intentions of individuals into Specific and Generic so as to understand if awareness campaigns in Fiji are generic or specific in nature. The theory of planned behavior is used to evaluate Fijians attitudes towards environmental issues in Fiji and their behavioral intentions in reducing their carbon footprints.

Method
This study focuses on attitudes of Fijians, especially, teachers and high school students towards reducing their carbon footprints. Teachers, senior high school students and advanced degree holders in private sector were selected for this study. These specific groups were selected in order to measure attitude and behaviors of the educated population in Fiji. This was also done to measure the awareness and information on sustainability that are instilled through Fiji's education system both in schools and universities. High school students were selected to present the attitudes of the future generation towards reducing carbon footprints as they will be most affected by the future impacts of current emissions and existing environment issues. Teachers at respective schools were contacted and they were asked to specify the likely number of participants including fellow teachers and students. Approximately, 300 questionnaires were distributed among teachers of primary schools and teachers and senior students of high schools in Fiji. 232 completed questionnaires were received with a response rate of 77.33%. A popular Facebook page in Fiji with 17,644 Likes was approached to share online survey link and its members were asked to complete the questionnaire.
The questionnaire link got 6 likes and no comments while all their other posts have an average of a 100 Likes.
Online surveys have issues such as low response rates which can lead to biased results. (Schonlau, 2002and Couper and 2000, Fricker and Groves, 1989).
The first part of the questionnaire focuses on gender, age, occupation and education level while the second part focuses on individual attitude towards 21 environmental issues in terms of their impact level to Fiji. The third part focuses on existing behavior and change in behavior towards minimizing individual carbon footprints. Responses of second and third parts were adopted from content analysis of Mc Kerchera and Prideaux (2011). In addition, respondents were given freedom to add both environmental issues and behaviors that were not listed. Respondents were urged to be as honest as possible for the credibility of the research.An honest effort was made to ensure the credibility of this study but limitations persist based on the methodology of this paper. Descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation were used to rank the issues in the study which were than compared with analyzed issues from the study conducted by McKerchera and Prideaux (2011).

Findings
The attitudes toward local environment impact and behavior to reduce these impacts are listed by mean score of all responses from the highest to the lowest. In the study, 58.3% of all respondents were female and most respondents (23.3%) between the ages of 21 to 25, majority being degree holders (42.7%) followed by diploma holders (23.7%) and secondary school seniors (18.5%). More than half (55.4%) of all respondents were employed in the public sector.    Table 4-2 Behavioral Intentions in order of mentions.

Source: Author's Calculations
As shown in Table 4 littering less (1.82) and turning off electric appliances (1.78). There were three common behaviors in the five most mentioned behaviors between the two studies and these were saving electricity, turning off lights and saving water. The three least mentioned behaviors were buying organic food, driving less and I have changed but can't explain how. In this study, behaviors are classified into two categories of Specific behavior and Generic behavior to identify as literature suggests that specificity and accuracy of knowledge is the key for change.   Table 4-3 shows how 17 mentioned behaviors classified into specific and generic behaviors. Only 35% (6 of 17) of all mentioned behaviors are Specific behaviors. A closer look at the two categories clearly shows that each specific behavior directly leads to reduction of carbon footprints in specific ways while generic behaviors are too vague and with such behavioral intentions it is difficult for individuals to act since they know what to do but they do not how to do it. Based on the theory of planned behavior, attitudes influence behavior therefore each specific behavior leads to actual reduction of carbon footprint.

Conclusions
This study had two objectives, the first being individuals attitude towards environmental issues particularly tourism. Tourism was ranked highly as it had severe environmental impacts in popular tourist destinations such as Hawaii, Jerusalem, Great Barrier Reef area of Australia and Florida (Mckercher and Prideaux, 2011) but this study shows that Fijians do not consider tourism as a high impact issue. Tourism as an environment issue was ranked 18th out of 21 issues according to the result of our study. Fiji's economic dependence on Tourism should project a critical attitude from individuals. The reasons to this low regard of Tourism as an environment issue can be attributed to two facets of awareness. The first being lack of awareness and secondly, an intentional lack of awareness because of development plans of the industry and to keep Fijians in the dark. It can be argued that awareness may exist without any changes in attitude but is very unlikely based on the figures of this study. This issue basically gives way for future research. The second objective was to categorize behavioral intentions into specific and generic which shows us that there are only 35% of specific behaviors out of all mentioned behaviors. This shows us that awareness campaigns in Fiji are generic in nature which means that authorities and campaigners need to target small number of specific behaviors where cause and effect can both be seen. To conclude, Fiji needs to significantly raise the bar in its awareness campaigns about the negative impacts of Tourism as citizens need to/have the right to know its negative impacts. Fiji also needs to move away from its generic form of awareness to specific issue