Did you know that energy use in buildings accounts for over 50% of Canmore’s greenhouse gas emissions? Increasing the energy efficiency of buildings is crucial to meeting the Bow Valley’s climate action goals.
In 2019-2020, the Biosphere Institute developed a series of education programs to help Canmore locals learn how to make their homes, businesses, or developments more energy efficient. In collaboration with social scientist Jill Bueddefeld, we also did something unique: we assessed whether our programs impacted participants’ levels of knowledge and intentions to take action.
This represented a step beyond simply counting how many people participate in environmental education programs – to asking whether those programs really help create change.
We first held a three-part workshop series for residents, focused on renewable energy, heating and cooling, and financing options. Before and after each workshop, we asked participants to complete short surveys and interviews with our staff and volunteers.
Subsequent analyses of these data indicated that the workshops significantly increased participants’ knowledge about renewable energy and financing options. The analyses also showed that audiences gained much greater mastery over topics related to energy-efficient heating and cooling. And, the vast majority of participants indicated that the workshops had decreased their perceptions of barriers to taking action and that they intended to make changes in their homes.
For builders, developers and tradespeople, we hosted the Bow Valley Sustainable Building Summit as a nine-part webinar series covering a variety of topics, including geothermal and solar energy, building codes, passive houses, and green architecture. Two-hundred fifty people attended these webinars, and over 70% completed surveys about their knowledge and the barriers they saw to making change.
We found that eight of the nine webinars significantly increased participants’ knowledge levels. Participants also commonly thought that taking action would be too expensive, or they weren’t sure where to begin. After viewing the webinars, however, two-thirds of participants reported that the education content they received had reduced their perceptions of these and other barriers.
Participatory learning as a way to improve education programs
This project used a participatory learning approach, which meant that learning went both ways: Before we set out to create education materials that might help teach our residents and businesses how make their properties more energy efficient, we first sought to understand what our citizens already know about energy efficiency, what they want to learn more about, and how they want to learn it.
We spent six months learning from local builders, property managers, contractors, realtors, architects, homeowners, and commercial property owners. All told, over 400 community members participated in one-on-one interviews, focus groups, and online questionnaires. We used a careful, replicable process to record participants’ responses as data, code it and analyze it.
We then used what we learned from our community members to develop energy efficiency education programs and information materials that were directly responsive to local needs and interests.
For example, we found that local homeowners are most interested in renewable energy options, deep-energy retrofit how-to’s, and financing mechanisms. They preferred to learn through workshops led by local and regional experts in these fields. We therefore hosted a three-part residential workshop series in early 2020.
We found that contractors, builders and developers wanted to learn about renewable energy, green building innovations, energy step codes, and the financial bottom line. They wanted to learn from experts who understood our cold-weather mountain context, in an interactive format. We planned the Sustainable Building Summit and trade show, held online due to Covid-19 precautions.
This project was made possible by a grant from Energy Efficiency Alberta
