The impact of intervention measures on household energy conservation and GHG emission reduction in Lithuania

Abstract

Household energy conservation and GHG emission reduction have been a topic of interest within applied social and environmental psychological research for a number of decades. Especially with commitments made by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to take more efforts to assess the impact of behavioural changes on GHG emission reduction in their Fifth Report this field of researcher is gaining a lot of attention recently. The article deals with the effectiveness of interventions aiming to encourage households to conserve energy and provides comparison of results of intervention studies aimed at household energy conservation in other countries with the case study conducted in Lithuania. The pilot study conducted in Lithuania aimed at evaluation of energy saving and GHG emission reduction potential in households by applying intervention measures targeting household behavioural changes. The study conducted in Lithuania revealed that energy saving potential makes 0.132 tne per year and GHG emission reduction potential in Lithuanian households makes 1.95MtCO2/ year. In comparison to saving potential and measures used for encouraging households to save energy in other countries, climate change mitigation policies used for Lithuanian households are not sufficient for exploiting all GHG mitigation potential.