The Impact of Certification Systems for Architectural Solutions in Green Office Buildings in the Perspective of Occupant Well-Being

The green building certification system has long-lasting benefits by improving building efficiency and sustainability. The ultimate goal of such classification is to promote the preservation of the global environment as well as the occupants’ well-being and their health. In this paper, we present examples of buildings that have been designed and built in Poland and have been certified with BREEAM, LEED and WELL. Our study investigates human factors in certification systems and examines the WELL Building Standard as a supplement to other green systems, which will probably be the most popular in the future. The green building movement should prioritize pro-human factors and the associated environmental beliefs to improve indoor environment quality for users’ needs. We present this matter on the example of the Polish office space market, providing statistics and analyzing the architecture of six certified office buildings from Warsaw, Poznań and Wrocław. They are a representative sample of buildings designed following the certification regime. It was demonstrated how this aids in improving work comfort, enhances the program of office spaces and the organization of service spaces within buildings, which increases the rank of this architecture and positively affects the urban environment.

Making Pledges More Powerful: Effects on Pro-Environmental Beliefs and Conservation Behavior

We developed pledges that capitalized on several self-related properties (e.g., freedom of choice, actual-ought self-discrepancies, foot-in-door technique) and manipulated two experimental factors: pledge beneficiary and pledge audience. In two studies, participants received a recycling pledge based on a random assignment in a 2 (Beneficiaries: Nature vs. Self) × 2 (Audience: Ingroup vs. Outgroup) design. Afterwards, we assessed their pro-environmental beliefs and provided them with a behavioral opportunity to support conservation (i.e., recycling debriefing forms in Study 1, writing letters to congresspeople regarding an environmental policy in Study 2). In both studies, an interaction between beneficiaries and audience was observed, showing that a recycling pledge framed as benefitting nature and sponsored by a social ingroup led to more progressive environmental beliefs. In Study 2, individuals in the same condition (i.e., the nature-ingroup pledge) wrote more persuasive letters (longer and more sophisticated letters) supporting pro-environmental legislation. Implications for constructing effective pledges and for leveraging the self to promote pro-environmental action are discussed.

INVESTIGATING WILLINGNESS TO PAY FOR GREEN HOTEL: EFFECT OF DESTINATION IMAGE AND ENVIRONMENTAL BELIEFS

The present study proposed a framework in examining the effect of destination image and environmental beliefs on willingness to pay for green hotel (WTP). The purpose of this study is to test these relationships. Additionally, the paper also seeks to establish the role of customer attitude to green hotels as a determinant of the relationships specified in the proposed model. The results supported our overall hypothesis and showed that destination image has the largest direct impact on attitude to green hotel while environmental beliefs have the largest direct effect on willing to pay premium for green hotel. Moreover, attitude to green hotel plays a mediating role between destination image and WTP, environmental beliefs and WTP.

Beliefs about Climate Change and Their Relationship with Environmental Beliefs and Sustainable Behavior: A View from Rural Communities

The study of beliefs and environmental behavior is of special interest, given the implications of climate change as a social phenomenon and the disagreements about what is socially believed about this phenomenon. This research was aimed at determining the associations between environmental beliefs and sustainable behavior in a group of inhabitants of southern Colombia. The methodology was exploratory and cross-sectional, with descriptive and correlational analyses. The sample was made up of 368 people from two regions in southern Colombia (57.5% female and 42.5% male); their ages ranged between 18 and 69 years (X = 19.36; SD = 8.59). Information was collected with questionnaires that measured climate change risk perception, environmental beliefs, and sustainable behavior. The results show higher scores for equitable behavior and environmental beliefs. Environmental beliefs—egobiocentrism—and risk perception of climate change predict both sustainable and pro-ecological behavior, as well as altruistic, frugal, and equitable behavior. It is concluded that the presence of environmental beliefs, along with information regarding a sense of environmental deterioration, climate change and the consequences for the future, can predict the implementation of actions for sustainable development.

Feeling Good in the Place We Live: The Moderating Role of the Perception of Environmental Resources in the Relationship between Values and Personal and Family Well-Being

The environmental psychological literature suggested that three different value orientations (egoistic, altruistic, and biospheric) are relevant for understanding environmental beliefs and intentions. We surveyed 365 Italian adults of different ages (range 18–87) to examine whether the egoistic, altruistic, and biospheric value orientations can lead to personal and/or family related well-being. Additionally, it is examined whether the perception of presence and accessibility of two types of environmental resources (natural and urbanistic) related to ecosystem services can moderate the relation between value orientations and personal and family well-being. Results of moderation analyses showed that people with high biospheric values felt themselves as more satisfied if they perceived high and medium (but not low) presence or accessibility of natural resources in their environment, while people with high egoistic values perceived their family more satisfied if they perceived the high and medium (but not low) presence of good infrastructures in their environment of living. No significant moderation model emerged considering the participants’ altruistic values. The implications for environmental beliefs and well-being are discussed.

Environmental Beliefs and Pro-Environmental Behavioral Intention of an Environmentally Themed Exhibition Audience: The Mediation Role of Exhibition Attachment

Many scholars have focused on the role of exhibitions in business promotion, and numerous studies have been conducted. The exhibition may influence the audience’s behaviors through the dissemination of information and ideas, but few researchers have looked into this further. There is a distinct lack of research on the process of exhibition influencing people’s behavioral intentions. Based on the belief–emotion–norm theoretical model, this study integrates environmental beliefs, exhibition attachment, and an audience’s environmental behavior intentions into a research model to explain how the exhibition affects the audience. The Macau International Environmental Cooperation Forum & Exhibition attendees served as the research object in the current empirical study. The study’s findings suggest that audiences’ environmental beliefs may have a significant and positive impact on their attachment to environmentally themed exhibitions as well as their environmental behavioral intentions. This study also confirmed that attachment to exhibitions, a temporary space, can play an important mediating role between environmental beliefs and intentions to engage in pro-environmental behavior. The exhibition dependency, in particular, acts as a mediator between environmental beliefs and pro-environmental behavior intentions. Although the mediating effect of exhibition identity is insignificant, exhibition dependence–exhibition identity as a whole has a partial mediating effect in the process of influencing exhibition audiences’ environmental behavior. This research helps to improve our understanding of how environmentally themed exhibitions influence audience behavior. It also has implications for exhibition organizers in terms of better exhibition planning, more effective information transmission, and influencing audience behavior.

The excuses tourists use to justify environmentally unfriendly behaviours

Tourists want to keep their environmental impact as low as possible (Firth and Hing, 1999; Miller, 2003; McKercher, Prideaux, Cheung and Law, 2010; Mair, 2011), and have many different opportunities to do so. Some behaviours reduce negative environmental impacts directly, for example: taking vacations closer to home to keep transportation related greenhouse emissions to a minimum. Other behaviours compensate for negative environmental impacts of their vacation, for example: purchasing carbon offsets for a flight. Despite their best intentions, however, people do not behave as environmentally friendly on vacation as they do at home (Dolnicar and Grün, 2009): 46% of consumers intend to purchase carbon offsets, but only 6% (Mair, 2011) or 7% (Dawson, Stewart, Lemelin and Scott’s, 2010) actually do purchase them. Intention-behaviour gaps range from 12% (Sloan and Adamsen, 2011), 22% (Juvan and Dolnicar, 2016), and 46% (Karlsson and Dolnicar, 2016) to as much as 76% (McKercher and Prideaux, 2011). How do tourists reconcile the misalignment of their pro-environmental beliefs with their not so environmentally friendly behaviour on vacation?