ECOISLAND: A System for Persuading Users to Reduce CO2 Emissions

A significant portion of the carbon dioxide emissions that have been shown to cause global warming are due to household energy consumption and traffic. EcoIsland is a computer system aimed at persuading and assisting individual families in changing their lifestyle patterns in a way that reduces CO₂ emissions. The system builds on our earlier work on persuasive ubiquitous computing applications and applies ideas from behaviorism, social psychology and emissions trading to attempt to motivate changes in users´ behavior. In this paper, we briefly describe the concept and the theories behind it, and provide preliminary results from a user study measuring its effectiveness.