Energy poverty
[3] Energy poverty often exacerbates existing vulnerabilities amongst underprivileged communities and negatively impacts public and household health, education, and women's opportunities.
According to the International Energy Agency, "use of traditional biomass will decrease in many countries, but is likely to increase in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa alongside population growth.
Basically, as income increases, the energy types used by households would be cleaner and more efficient but more expensive as moving from traditional biomass to electricity.
"Households at lower levels of income and development tend to be at the bottom of the energy ladder, using fuel that is cheap and locally available but not very clean nor efficient.
According to the World Health Organization, over three billion people worldwide are at these lower rungs, depending on biomass fuels—crop waste, dung, wood, leaves, etc.—and coal to meet their energy needs.
A disproportionate number of these individuals reside in Asia and Africa: 95% of the population in Afghanistan uses these fuels, 95% in Chad, 87% in Ghana, 82% in India, 80% in China, and so forth.
Energy deprivation is categorized by seven indicators: "access to light, modern cooking fuel, fresh air, refrigeration, recreation, communication, and space cooling.
Older women are particularly more vulnerable to experiencing energy poverty because of structural gender inequalities in financial resources and the ability to invest in energy-saving strategies.
[20] Additionally, having consistent access to energy means that girl children, who are usually responsible for collecting fuel for their household, have more time to focus on their studies and attend school.
[23] Education is a key component in growing human capital which in turn facilitates economic growth by enabling people to be more productive workers in the economy.
Moreover, women and children, who stick around their mothers to help with domestic chores, respectively, are in danger of long-term exposure to indoor air pollution caused by burning traditional biomass fuels.
[21] Research has found that people who live in energy poverty have an increased risk of respiratory diseases like influenza and asthma and even a positive correlation with higher mortality rates during winters.
[27] Proposed as an alternative for the improvement of public health and welfare, the distribution of cooking stoves could be a more inexpensive and immediate approach to decreasing mortality rates within the sector of energy poverty.
Distributing cleaner liquified petroleum gas (LPG) or electric stoves among developing countries would prevent the inadequate cooking and dangerous exposure to traditional biomass fuel.
Indeed, there is a direct relationship between the absence of adequate energy services and many poverty indicators such as infant mortality, illiteracy, life expectancy and total fertility rate.
Inadequate access to energy also exacerbates rapid urbanization in developing countries, by driving people to seek better living conditions.
[35][36] Another EPEE project found that 1 in 7 households in Europe were on the margins of fuel poverty by using three indicators of checking for leaky roofs, arrears on utility bills, ability to pay for adequate heating, mold in windows.
[37] High energy prices, insufficient insulation in dwellings,[38] and low incomes contribute to increased vulnerability to fuel poverty.
Climate change adds more pressure as weather events become colder and hotter, thereby increasing demand for fuel to cool and heat the home.
Energy poverty is challenging to measure and thus analyze because it is privately experienced within households, specific to cultural contexts, and dynamically changes depending on the time and space.
For example: greater access to clean energy for cooking improves the health of women by reducing the indoor air pollution associated with burning traditional biomasses for cooking; farmers can find better prices for their crops using telecommunication networks; people have more time to pursue leisure and other activities which can increase household income from the time saved from looking for firewood and other traditional biomasses, etc.
[45] Study findings have informed policy makers in African countries on state intervention methods to increase household energy access and reduce the gap in educational opportunities between rural and urban areas.
[45] A study involving data from 33 African countries from 2010-2017 demonstrates a strong correlation between energy poverty, infant mortality, and inequality in education.
The spread of waterborne diseases, smoke emissions, and low fuel quality continues to affect infant mortality and negatively impact educational performance among children in the region.
[46] On average, girls receive lower education than boys in the rural areas of the region affected by the lack of clean energy sources.
South Asian cities like Delhi in India are bearing the social and fiscal costs of this demand-supply gap,[54] resulting in a power crisis.
Oftentimes linked to socioeconomic cleavages, energy poverty within LAC still exposes more than 80 million people to respiratory illnesses and diseases for relying on fuels like charcoal to cook.
The COVID-19 Pandemic has demonstrated an increased need for international energy resilience through housing, economic, social, and environmental policies after more than 150 million people were pushed into poverty.
This includes national and international institutions as well as the ability to deploy technologies, absorb and disseminate financing, provide transparent regulation, introduce systems of peer review, and share and monitor relevant information and data.
[64] "In 1991, the World Bank Group, an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs, established the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) to address global environmental issues in partnership with international institutions, private sector, etc., especially by providing funds to developing countries' all kinds of projects.
