Climate Change Mitigation in Households between Market Failures and Psychological Barriers

Though there are areas of climate change mitigation linked to household’s energy consumption having huge greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction potential as energy renovation or installation of micro generation technologies using renewable energy sources, these GHG emission reduction potentials are not realized so far. The main input of the paper is to overcome this gap and to provide a systematic review of the main barriers of climate change mitigation behavior linked to energy consumption in households and to develop policies to overcome these barriers. The main policies and measures to reduce GHG emissions of energy combustion in households are promotion of renewable energy consumption and energy efficiency improvements however, these policies have been not successful in overcoming some important barriers of climate change mitigation in households. The empirical evidence of behavioral failures is deepened in this paper and the correlation between market barriers, unsuccessful climate change mitigation policies and behavioral and psychological barriers is provided based on systematic literature review.