Measuring public acceptance of climate-friendly technologies based on creativity and cognitive approaches: Practical guidelines for reforming risky energy policies in Iran.

Abstract In order to mitigate climate change and reduce fossil fuel dependency in Iran, the government of the country has announced its renewable energy policies to increase the use of renewable energies, but the share of the energy generation mix of Iran is very low due to the lack of public acceptance. These challenges continue and can be hard to overcome at all levels. This paper investigates this problem at regional level by measuring public acceptance towards development of climate-friendly technologies in order to provide required feedbacks to policy-makers of the government for ushering changes in their policies already made or in their executing mechanism, possibly deducting future risks such as public opposition from their end and improving the level of acceptance. This study uses a mixed-methods analytical approach for quantitatively taking that level, including creativity techniques and fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs). FCMs could directly map out policy-makers' cognitions on the problem. This study provides the mathematical formulation of the problem with its conceptual interpretation to import policy-makers' knowledge into FCMs when the knowledge is gained explicitly with creativity techniques. The authors focused on a case of Solar Water Heater adoption in the city of Behbahan in Khuzestan Province. Graphical abstract Image Highlights • A combinative method for measuring public acceptance of clean energy technologies is proposed. • It provides the mathematical formulation of the acceptance problem with its conceptual interpretation. • It focused on a case study of solar water heater adoption in Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]