The impact of an information leaflet about coffee production on students' awareness about environmental issues

This project was jointly conducted by Stoyan Faldzhiyskiy (Ecosystem Europe, Bulgaria) and Martin Huber (University of Fribourg, Switzerland) to experimentally assess the effect of an information leaflet about coffee production on students’ awareness about environmental issues as well as self-assessed buying behavior. To this end, Ecosystem Europe, an NGO in Bulgaria, conducted a survey about environmental and social impacts of coffee growing among high school pupils (439 observations) and university students (83 observations) in Bulgaria. At a particular point in the survey interview, students were either provided or not provided with an information leaflet with facts about coffee growing. The leaflet was quasi-randomized as it was distributed to every second student only. The leaflet contained textual and visual information about regions growing coffee, related deforestation, biodiversity loss, use of pesticides, economic and social implications, coffee’s water footprint, and the fact that most coffee biomass becomes waste. The results suggest that w.r.t. creating awareness about environmental issues, the leaflet had the largest (and statistically significant) impacts on older students, in particular among those attending non-technical universities, while the effects on younger (i.e. high school) students were mostly not statistically significantly different from zero.