PIRE: Confronting Energy Poverty: Building an Interdisciplinary Evidence Base, Network, and Capacity for Transformative Change

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Principal Investigator: Pamela Jagger (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)Co-PIs: Michael Emch, Barbara Entwisle (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Andrew Grieshop, Stephen Kelly (North Carolina State University)Access to modern energy services are limited in the developing world. Energy poverty, or lack of access to modern energy services, has serious implications for the well-being of individuals and communities, the environment, and impacts economic growth. This project seeks to understand the impact of strategies to improve access to modern energy in Southern Africa, a region with low energy access. The researchers will evaluate the environmental and human impacts of approaches that rely on promotion of new technologies and/or incentives for behavior change to mitigate energy poverty. They will investigate the social, demographic, and spatial dimensions of energy poverty by analyzing geographic variables, and consider the optimal scale of interventions for maximizing environmental benefits and human well-being. The researchers will use social ecological systems frameworks and theories of population and environment dynamics to study energy poverty. They will foster and sustain a network of academic, practitioner, and policy communities to fill critical gaps in the strategies used to mitigate energy poverty. This project will train over 70 postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate researchers from disciplines as diverse as anthropology and engineering.Sub-Saharan Africa is an epicenter of energy poverty, defined as the lack of access to electricity and reliance on biomass fuels. In Southern Africa, the absolute number of energy poor is projected to increase through 2050. Energy poverty has implications for climate, environmental sustainability, human health, and well-being, with negative impacts realized at individual and collective-scales, and in local, regional, and global contexts. The researchers' goal is to build an interdisciplinary evidence base and network for transformative change. They will center their research and educational program around two themes: evaluating technology and incentives; and population and environment dynamics. Using rigorous impact evaluation research designs, they will measure the air quality, land use, and human welfare impacts of a representative set of novel and scalable technology and behavioral interventions designed to mitigate energy poverty. The researchers will use life-cycle analysis to evaluate temporal trade-offs and synergies between environmental and social outcomes. In the second theme, they will investigate the social, demographic, and spatial dimensions of energy poverty by analyzing geographic variables as determinants of energy poverty, and consider the question of optimal scale of implementation of interventions for maximizing environmental benefits and human well-being. Using their comparative research design, they will explore the relationship between energy poverty and urbanization and migration, and shocks such as droughts and political instability. The research is innovative for two reasons. First, it uses rigorous interdisciplinary impact evaluation as the anchor. The team will study what works, why it works, and over what spatial and temporal scale. Second, the study of energy poverty is highly fragmented across a large number of disciplines with very little cross-fertilization or engagement with interdisciplinary frameworks (e.g., complex socio-ecological systems and population and environment dynamics). The researchers will use these theoretical lenses to shed new light on this problem, and guide a coherent body of empirical research in an understudied region.This project is co-funded by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.