The Urban Household Energy Transition
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The Urban Household Energy Transition
As cities in developing countries grow and become more prosperous, energy use shifts from fuelwood to fuels like charcoal, kerosene, and coal, and, ultimately, to fuels such as liquid petroleum gas, and electricity. Energy use is not usually considered as a social issue. Yet, as this book demonstrates, the movement away from traditional fuels has a strong socio-economic dimension, as poor people are the last to attain the benefits of using modern energy. The result is that health risks from the continued use of wood fuel fall most heavily on the poor, and indoor pollution from wood stoves has its greatest effect on women and children who cook and spend much more of their time indoors. Barnes, Krutilla, and Hyde provide the first worldwide assessment of the energy transition as it occurs in urban households, drawing upon data collected by the World Bank Energy Sector Management Assistance Programme (ESMAP). From 1984-2000, the program conducted over 25,000 household energy surveys in 45 cities spanning 12 countries and 3 continents. Additionally, GIS mapping software was used to compile a biomass database of vegetation patterns surrounding 34 cities. Using this rich set of geographic, biological, and socioeconomic data, the authors describe problems and policy options associated with each stage in the energy transition. The authors show how the poorest are most vulnerable to changes in energy markets and demonstrate how the collection of biomass fuel contributes to deforestation. Their book serves as an important contribution to development studies, and as a guide for policymakers hoping to encourage sustainable energy markets and an improved quality of life for growing urban populations.
Urban Energy Transition
Contemporary cities, initially shaped by the logic of the Industrial Revolution, have evolved into a worldwide urbanization force, driven by readily available and relatively cheap fossil fuel supplies. They now face major changes as the fossil fuel era rapidly comes to a close. The end of this era marks the emergence of a new urbanism based on a massive energy transformation, characterized by the growing embrace of efficiency programs, sustainable forms of distributed energy generation, and new urban structures, market approaches, technologies, and policies. If a soft landing from the fossil fuel high can be engineered geo-regionally or even globally, successful strategies to preempt or adapt to change in realizing a sustainable, post-fossil fuel future will have to entail revolutions in urban energy infrastructure, city form, urban development logic, community culture, and management. This volume will characterize the nature of this historical change, and explore current initiatives to avoid a human, environmental, economical and cultural cataclysm, and to stabilize the long-term outlook for our urban communities.
Complex Systems and Social Practices in Energy Transitions
This book offers an interdisciplinary discussion of the fundamental issues concerning policies for sustainable transition to renewable energies from the perspectives of sociologists, physicists, engineers, economists, anthropologists, biologists, ecologists and policy analysts. Adopting a combined approach, these are analysed taking both complex systems and social practice theories into consideration to provide deeper insights into the evolution of energy systems. The book then draws a series of important conclusions and makes recommendations for the research community and policy makers involved in the design and implementation of policies for sustainable energy transitions.