“Recognizing to be a part of the solution” towards sector-wide decarbonization of wineries: Evidence from Japan

Climate change poses an urgent and existential threat to the wine sector. However, it is not easy for wineries and farmers to take action to reduce carbon emissions compared to adaptation. How can we promote these actions? Farmers often seek information before taking action, which influences their current risk perceptions of extreme weather conditions or moral norms. Regarding the information, a positive approach focusing on empowering farmers to take action to address climate change is generally more successful at engaging people and minimizing defensive reactions. Given the background that the wine sector is one of the sectors that is suffering most directly and urgently from climate change, momentum is building among the pioneering wineries for an industry-wide effort calling on other wineries to strengthen the sustainability of their businesses, to take part in the decarbonizing wine sector. We, therefore, test and evaluated the effect of a message that makes people aware that they are part of the solution which combines an “influential gain” nudge. Message framing has been an important focus in agricultural policy research, yet many prior analyses have been implemented in an online survey (Kuhfuss et al. 2016) or a lab-in-the-filed experiment (Thomas et al. 2019; Peth and Mußhoff 2020). We used a natural field experiment for all registered wineries in Japan to increase the persuasiveness of the framing of the messages. The investigators conduct a block randomized controlled trial for almost all wineries in Japan to evaluate the impact of the informational intervention on information-seeking behavior: the control group receives normal climate-related information and the treatment group receives information with a positive-framing message as follows: “Your actions will encourage those around you to take action against global warming, and in turn, contribute to the grape and wine industry as a whole.” The heterogeneous treatment effects will also be analyzed. More specifically, we analyze the effects on the following six characteristic variables: (1) production status (amount, established year, in-house brewing), (2) vineyards’ located area (latitude and longitude）, (3) export intention, (4) the subjective belief of Japanese wine’s export value in next 30 years, (5) the subjective belief on poor color grape due to high temperature in next 30 years, and (6) awareness of climate change.