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Agnė Budžytė is a junior researcher and PhD student in Sociology at Civil Society and Sustainability research group at Kaunas University of Technology. Her research interests are: sociology of risk and uncertainty, energy and society, energy transition, climate change.
The Baltic states in general and Lithuania in particular represent a controversial combination of rapidly increasing climate change impacts and moderate or low concern with the climate crisis. A value shift is essential for the societal support and acceptance of renewable energy solutions. This study investigates the role of environmental attitudes in shaping the acceptance and risk perceptions of renewable energy technologies. The article analyses how environmental attitudes are shaping public attitudes towards climate change and perceptions of renewable energy technologies in Lithuania using New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) and environmental identity questions. The study analyses data from a representative public opinion survey with 1029 respondents conducted in Lithuania. The results reveal that environmental identity is a more significant factor in shaping risk perceptions of renewable technologies than is the NEP scale. The balance of nature dimension from the NEP is more closely related to perceptions of renewables than are humans’ right to rule claims. The results show that environmental attitudes have low explanatory power in explaining perceptions of energy technologies in Lithuania.
Aistė Balžekienė; Agnė Budžytė. The Role of Environmental Attitudes in Explaining Public Perceptions of Climate Change and Renewable Energy Technologies in Lithuania. Sustainability 2021, 13, 4376 .
AMA StyleAistė Balžekienė, Agnė Budžytė. The Role of Environmental Attitudes in Explaining Public Perceptions of Climate Change and Renewable Energy Technologies in Lithuania. Sustainability. 2021; 13 (8):4376.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAistė Balžekienė; Agnė Budžytė. 2021. "The Role of Environmental Attitudes in Explaining Public Perceptions of Climate Change and Renewable Energy Technologies in Lithuania." Sustainability 13, no. 8: 4376.
The concept of Earth system science denotes a shift in the scientific discourse from disciplinary accounts of isolated components of the global environment towards the holistic and interdisciplinary treatment of their complex, functional interactions. We measure to what extent the environmental scientific literature of the past three decades reflects this system turn. Our initial dataset consists of 133,670 articles published in 95 relevant journals since 1990. We apply a combination of topic modelling and network analysis. Correlated Topic Models identify latent themes (“topics”) in the scientific discourse as well as intertopic correlations. This allows the generation of topic networks and thus the application of network-analytic techniques. We generate and analyze 2 topic networks. The first network focuses on climate linkages in a subset of our corpus consisting only of environmental journals without a climate-specific orientation: as the climate system is constitutional for the notion of Earth system science, a system turn should reflect itself in strong linkages between climate- and non-climate environmental topics. The second network, based on the full dataset, applies community detection to identify broader topical clusters. Here, we expect the system turn to manifest itself in communities with high topical diversity regarding the components of the global environment as well as types of human-nature interactions, rather than reflecting the boundaries between broader research fields. Our results show that climate topics are comparatively weakly connected and less integrated into broader thematic packages than other topics; that linkages frequently reflect conceptual debates rather than functional interactions between substantive environmental components; and that the scientific discourse splits into 4 broader domains, two of those being topically homogeneous and the other two comprising only marginally diverse topics. We conclude that the concept of Earth system science is primarily aspirational in nature rather than reflecting an empirical shift in the structure of the scientific discourse.
Florian Rabitz; Alin Olteanu; Jurgita Jurkevičienė; Agnė Budžytė. A topic network analysis of the system turn in the environmental sciences. Scientometrics 2021, 126, 2107 -2140.
AMA StyleFlorian Rabitz, Alin Olteanu, Jurgita Jurkevičienė, Agnė Budžytė. A topic network analysis of the system turn in the environmental sciences. Scientometrics. 2021; 126 (3):2107-2140.
Chicago/Turabian StyleFlorian Rabitz; Alin Olteanu; Jurgita Jurkevičienė; Agnė Budžytė. 2021. "A topic network analysis of the system turn in the environmental sciences." Scientometrics 126, no. 3: 2107-2140.
Laws and plans for environmental protection and mitigation of climate change is a tough challenge for governmental organizations at the highest levels. A need to ensure a more sustainable future requires strict actions backed by constant support from the public, and yet there is always a risk that the public will not accept any new strategies, if they do not reflect their personal concerns. This paper presents an investigation into how climate change concerns affect the public’s energy preferences. It also reports energy security concerns and the political preferences related to climate change, and how this has to be considered in increasing the support for new political tools in the energy sector. The analysis is based on the data gathered from a representative public survey conducted during October–November 2018 in Lithuania and reveal how concerns about climate change affect the public’s preference for energy generated from renewable sources also lessening the preference for fossil fuels and other non-sustainable options.
Agne Budzyte. Public Energy Preferences from the Perspective of Climate Change Mitigation. Climate Change Management 2020, 875 -893.
AMA StyleAgne Budzyte. Public Energy Preferences from the Perspective of Climate Change Mitigation. Climate Change Management. 2020; ():875-893.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAgne Budzyte. 2020. "Public Energy Preferences from the Perspective of Climate Change Mitigation." Climate Change Management , no. : 875-893.
This paper sets a framework for using semiotics as an analytical method for Earth system science. It illustrates the use of such a method by analysing a dataset consisting of 32,383 abstracts of research articles pertaining to Earth system science, modelled as semantic networks. The analysis allows us to explain the epistemological advantages of this method as originating in the systems thinking common in both Earth system science and semiotics. The purpose of this methodological proposal is that of bringing the recent and critical planetary boundaries framework to the attention of ecosemiotics and biosemiotic criticism, and vice versa. Ecosemiotics is a branch of the biosemiotic modelling theory and is thus grounded in Charles Peirce’s schematic semiotics, but also developed in inspiration of Juri Lotman’s systemic semiotics. Both of these foundations of ecosemiotics are compatible with the rationale of Earth system science, given the schematism of Peirce’s semiotics and Lotman’s notion of meaning as an affordance of the biosphere. Far from exhausting the hermeneutic possibilities evoked by the discussed dataset, we argue that such semiotic analysis, made possible by the digital capacity of modelling large amounts of data, reveals new horizons for semiotic analysis, particularly regarding humans’ modelling of the environment.
Alin Olteanu; Florian Rabitz; Jurgita Jurkevičienė; Agnė Budžytė. The case for a semiotic method in Earth system science: Semantic networks of environmental research. Sign Systems Studies 2020, 47, 552–589 -552–589.
AMA StyleAlin Olteanu, Florian Rabitz, Jurgita Jurkevičienė, Agnė Budžytė. The case for a semiotic method in Earth system science: Semantic networks of environmental research. Sign Systems Studies. 2020; 47 (3/4):552–589-552–589.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAlin Olteanu; Florian Rabitz; Jurgita Jurkevičienė; Agnė Budžytė. 2020. "The case for a semiotic method in Earth system science: Semantic networks of environmental research." Sign Systems Studies 47, no. 3/4: 552–589-552–589.