I’m pleased to announce that we have just published a new article in Global Environmental Change, entitled “Socio-economic conditions for satisfying human needs at low energy use: An international analysis of social provisioning”.
In the article, which was led by my colleague Jefim Vogel, we analyse how the relationship between energy use and the satisfaction of human needs varies with a wide range of socio-economic factors (what we refer to as “provisioning factors”). We find that there are beneficial provisioning factors, which allow basic needs to be met at lower levels of energy use, and detrimental provisioning factors, which do the opposite.
Beneficial factors include public service quality, income equality, democracy, and electricity access, while detrimental factors include extractivism and economic growth beyond a moderate level of affluence. Our results suggest that improving beneficial provisioning factors and abandoning detrimental ones could enable countries to satisfy basic needs at sustainable levels of energy use.
It’s a very exciting article, and the most detailed analysis of provisioning systems that we have done to date. You can skip over the stats in the Methods section if that’s not your thing, but the results themselves are quite striking. I’m attaching the article for reference, although it’s open-access, and also available online here:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102287
Dr Daniel W. O’Neill is an Associate Professor in Ecological Economics, Research Group Leader, Economics and Policy for Sustainability and Program Manager, MSc Ecological Economics with the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, UK