What drives public willingness to participate in the voluntary personal carbon-trading scheme? A case study of Guangzhou Pilot, China

The escalation of risks associated with environmental and climatic aspects has accelerated the introduction of voluntary personal carbon trading (PCT), a policy instrument for promotion and facilitation of low-carbon behavior in the domestic sector. This paper examines participants' motivation in the Guangdong pilot project, which aims to develop the first voluntary PCT scheme (Carbon Generalized System of Preferences, CGSP) in China to reduce the domestic sector's emissions and increase the liquidity of the Guangdong pilot emission trading scheme. The CGSP acceptance model is based on the technology acceptance model and explores the drivers of the public's participation willingness (PW) in the CGSP scheme. Further, the structural equation model has been adopted to explore the influence paths of each driver by using survey data (N = 1190) collected from Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China. The empirical results demonstrated that the strong and direct drivers are associated with the institutional technical environment, perceived usefulness and participation risk. However, other drivers affect PW through the mediation effect of perceived usefulness. Notably, implementation cost had no significant effect on PW.