Leadership by Example to Empower Wineries to Take Action to Address Climate Change: 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 emission comparing to adaptation. How can we encourage these actions? Farmers often seek information before take action, which influences their current risk perceptions of extreme weather condition 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. We therefore evaluate the impact of the “Leadership by Examples” flyer on the climate change-related information-gathering behavior of wineries in Japan. Leadership by example arises when individuals make sequential decisions, and the choice made by the first mover (the leader) influences the contributions of others (Jack and Recalde 2015; Gachter and Renner, 2018). We conduct a block randomized controlled trial for almost all wineries in Japan to evaluate the impact of the information provision on information seeking behavior: the control group receives normal climate related information and the treatment group receives the information with “Leadership by Examples” flyer. We further evaluate the impact on the wineries willingness to perform life cycle assessment (LCA). LCA allows wineries to understand their climate footprint, pinpoints opportunities for climate change mitigation, and tracks the impacts of emissions reductions over time. The heterogeneous treatment effects are also analyzed.