Energy Poverty PIRE in Southern Africa (EPPSA)
The Energy Poverty PIRE in Southern Africa (EPPSA) is a 5-year program with three broad objectives: 1) Evaluate the environmental and human well-being impacts of real-world energy poverty interventions 2) Investigate the social, demographic, and spatial dimensions of energy poverty and consider the optimal scale of interventions to maximize environmental benefits and human well-being 3) Train over 70 postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate researchers in interdisciplinary collaborative research in low resource settings. We evaluate the environmental and human well-being impacts of real-world interventions that rely on promotion of new technologies and/or incentives for behavior change. We also investigate the social, demographic, and spatial dimensions of energy poverty in national perspective 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. We introduce social ecological systems frameworks and theories of population and environment dynamics into the study of energy poverty.
