An Awareness Based Approach to Avoid Rebound Effects in ICTs

The full exploitation of ICTs environmental potential benefits needs to take into account a social dimension, where there is a shift of role from passive user to aware user of ICT-based services. After a short overview of the rebound effect in ICTs, the paper will focus on the role that users, consumers or citizens can play in spreading and adopting beneficial behavior. The enabling factor of this active participative role is the collective situational awareness about environmental effects of actions. Such awareness makes a green behavior easier and can counter possible rebound effects. An Agent Based Model approach is proposed to study individual and collective behavioral changes toward sustainability using ICT-based services and for sustainable ICTs. The use of ABM to simulate how environmental awareness spread is innovative and crosses the disciplinary borders between ICTs, energy and environment disciplines, as well as social and behavioral sciences.