Giacomo Falchetta

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis | IIASA · Energy, Climate, and Environment

Spatially explicit data on electricity access and use are essential for effective policy-making and infrastructure planning in low-income, data-scarce regions. We present and validate a 1-km resolution electricity access dataset covering sub-Saharan Africa built on gridded nighttime light, population, and land cover data. Using light radiance proba...

In sub-Saharan Africa, 160 million grid-connected electricity consumers live in countries where hydropower accounts for over 50% of total power supply. A warmer climate with more frequent and intense extremes could result in supply reliability issues. Here, (i) a robust framework to highlight the interdependencies between hydropower, water availabi...

Increasing human demands for water, energy, food and materials, are expected to accentuate resource supply challenges over the coming decades. Experience suggests that long-term strategies for a single sector could yield both trade-offs and synergies for other sectors. Thus, long-term transition pathways for linked resource systems should be inform...

Ending energy poverty is a necessary condition for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Boosting electricity access levels is, however, insufficient if consumption and reliability indicators stagnate. Previous research has shown that satellite-derived data can complement field surveys in tracking energy poverty but with little consid...

Hydro-climatic extremes can affect the reliability of electricity supply, in particular in countries that depend greatly on hydropower or cooling water and have a limited adaptive capacity. Assessments of the vulnerability of the power sector and of the impact of extreme events are thus crucial for decision-makers, and yet often they are severely c...

The historical diffusion of the potato in the Old World serves as an example of the contribution of technological innovations to socio-economic growth and development (Nunn and Qian in Q J Econ 126(2):593–650, 2011). Climate-related diseases, on the other hand, might offset some of these benefits. Here we examine the long-term impact of malaria on...

The interplay of a warming climate and socio-demographic transformations will increase global heat exposure. Assessing future use and impacts of energy-intensive appliances for indoor thermal adaptation is therefore a crucial policy goal. Here we train statistical models on multi-country household survey data (n = 480,555) to generate global gridde...

Irrespective of water resource abundancy, in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) agriculture is predominantly rainfed. Along with fertilisation, irrigation could support smallholder farmers in stabilizing crop yields, increasing incomes, and achieving food security. A key barrier to irrigation uptake is inadequate rural electricity supply for pumping and dist...

Studies show the role of various electrification technologies in providing electricity access to households in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on electricity demand for end-use services such as lighting, cooking, heating, cooling and other appliance use. The demand for productive use of electricity, which is important to enhance income generation...

Studies show the role of various electrification technologies in providing electricity access to households in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on electricity demand for end-use services such as lighting, cooking, heating, cooling and other appliance use. The demand for productive use of electricity, which is important to enhance income generation...

This technical note introduces a methodology to estimate electricity requirement ranges for health care facilities, especially unserved and under-served facilities. It combines a bottom-up approach to assessing the electricity requirements at the facility level with a geographic information system (GIS) based analysis. The methodology is applied to...

Background and objectives: The co-occurring trends of population aging and climate change mean that rising numbers of U.S. older adults are at risk of intensifying heat exposure. We estimate county-level variations in older populations' heat exposure in the early (1995-2014) and mid (2050) 21st century. We identify the extent to which rising expos...

Ghana is the first country in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to aim for universal health coverage (UHC). Based on Ghana’s UHC system, the accessibility and distribution of healthcare facilities were evaluated for 2020. Projecting into 2030, this study aimed at providing geographical information data for guiding future policies on siting required healthca...

Empirical evaluation of the household-level economic effects of electricity access in rural regions has challenged researchers due to data scarcity issues and identification challenges. Previous studies provide mixed evidence depending on the context and the empirical approach adopted. Continued efforts towards a robust understanding of this linkag...

Transitioning to a sustainable energy system poses a massive challenge to communities, nations, and the global economy in the next decade and beyond. A growing portfolio of satellite data products is available to support this transition. Satellite data complement other information sources to provide a more complete picture of the global energy syst...

The study of elevation change using pre- and post-event raster grids obtained by airborne laser scans is central to many scientific areas, including geomorphology, landscape science and environmental science. Separating real elevation change from noise is a nontrivial task due to complex sources of measurement uncertainty causing errors to be spati...

In rural sub-Saharan Africa – the global poverty hotspot – the vast majority of cropland is rainfed only, resulting in reduced and unstable yields. Smallholder farmers account for 80% of agricultural production but they have limited access to relevant services to support both commercial operations and their livelihoods: more than two-thirds of rura...

In a world where climate change, population growth, and global diseases threaten economic access to food, policies and contingency plans can strongly benefit from reliable forecasts of agricultural vegetation health. To inform decisions, it is also crucial to quantify the forecasting uncertainty and prove its relevance for food security. Yet, in pr...

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires ensuring universal energy access. Yet, governments of low-income countries face significant budget constraints for the capital-intensive infrastructure required to reach the hundreds of millions of households and businesses without grid electricity. In this context, private investors are t...

A potential response to the COVID-19 pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) with long-term benefits is to provide electricity for medical equipment in rural health centers and communities. This study identifies a large gap in the electrification of healthcare facilities in SSA, and it shows that decentralized photovoltaic systems can offer a clean, r...

In rural sub-Saharan Africa, the global poverty hotspot, smallholder farmers account for 80% of agricultural production, with 90% of cropland being exclusively rainfed. A key obstacle to rural development and poverty elimination is the lack of electricity access: less than one in three dwellers have electricity at home. The main barrier to rural el...

This dissertation is a collection of five essays examining some important energy-related aspects at the interplay of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)’s development and its interactions with the regional and global environment. The essays are introduced by a general overview chapter – highlighting the core energy-related challenges of SSA and the scope of t...

The Indus basin has a large hydropower untapped potential for electricity generation and to regulate the Indus river flow, which could reduce flooding events and provide water supply during drought periods. In this paper, a computational module is developed to localize potential sites for hydropower generation and seasonal pumped hydropower storage...

Accessibility to transit, together with other important system characteristics such as network coverage and frequency, is a crucial driver of modal choice for urban commuting. In turn, commuting is a major driver of energy consumption and of socio-environmental externalities in cities. So far, few quantitative and comparative assessments of paratra...

Globally about 800 million people live without electricity at home, over two thirds of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. Planning electricity access infrastructure and allocating resources efficiently requires a careful assessment of the diverse energy needs across space, time, and sectors. Because of data scarcity, most country or regional-scale el...

In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), diets are largely based on cereal or root staple crops. Together with socio-cultural change, economic and demographic growth could boost the demand for meat, with significant environmental repercussions. We model meat consumption pathways to 2050 for SSA based on several scenarios calibrated on historical demand drivers...

Achieving universal electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa – a milestone of SDG 7 – requires about $30bn annually until 2030 on the top of baseline investment. The private sector plays a key role in supplying these investment flows, given the governmental budgetary constraints. Yet, private players face numerous sources of risk in their infrastru...

In response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers worldwide adopted unprecedented measures to limit disease spread, with major repercussions on economic activities and the environment. Here we provide empirical evidence of the impact of a lockdown policy on satellite-measured agricultural land greenness in Badung, a highly populated regency o...

If coupled with a low-carbon electricity mix, electric vehicles (EVs) can represent an important technology for transport decarbonization and local pollutants abatement. Yet, to ensure large-scale EVs adoption, an adequate charging stations network must be developed. This paper provides the first comprehensive bottom-up analysis of the EV charging...

Nearly 1 billion people live without electricity at home. Energy poverty limits their ability to take autonomous actions to improve air circulation and the cooling of their homes. It is therefore important that electricity-access planners explicitly evaluate the current and future air circulation and cooling needs of energy-poor households, in addi...

In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) diets are largely based on cereal or root staple crops. Together with socio-cultural change, economic and demographic growth could boost the demand for meat, with significant environmental repercussions. We model meat consumption pathways to 2050 for SSA based on several scenarios calibrated on historical demand drivers....

In response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers worldwide adopted unprecedented measures to limit disease spread, with major repercussions on labour markets and economic growth. Here we provide empirical evidence of their impact on agricultural activity due to sectoral labour reallocation. Analysing daily satellite data in a non-parametric...

Significance Achieving universal health care access is a key development priority and a target of Sustainable Development Goal number 3. The COVID-19 pandemic has only reinforced this urge. A rapid expansion of public, affordable health care infrastructure is particularly crucial in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): communicable diseases are the first caus...

La crescita delle città nei Paesi in via di sviluppo sta causando un forte aumento della domanda di mobilità urbana. Non si possono gestire questi cambiamenti con le categorie tipiche del mondo occidentale, ma bisogna considerare le peculiarità delle città del Sud del mondo. Per questo il binomio a cui fare riferimento è quello rappresentato da inf...

Land use and water management have considerable impacts on regional climates. This paper proposes that in humid regions with low wind patterns the construction of hydropower storage reservoirs contributes to the increases in the probability of precipitation in the regional climate. This observation has been tested with a methodology that calculates...

Globally about 800 million people live without electricity at home, over two thirds of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. Ending energy poverty is a key development priority because energy plays an enabling role for human wellbeing and economic activities. Planning electricity access infrastructure and allocating resources efficiently requires a care...

COVID-19 disease containment policies have locked half of the world population at home. The transportation sector is one of the most immediately and starkly hit. We discuss the potential longerrun, structural impacts on transport demand, the behaviour-induced modal shifts, and the implications for sectoral energy demand and environmental externalit...

In spite of abundant generation potential, as of 2019 East Africa has an electrification level of 36%, with over 140 million people without access. Here, a bottom-up geospatial model (OnSSET) is used to develop least-cost pathways to universal access to electricity by 2030 for different consumption-tier objectives under three regional grid electric...

The world is undergoing an energy transition with the inclusion of intermittent sources of energy in the grid. These variable renewable energy sources require energy storage solutions to be integrated smoothly over different time steps. In the near future, batteries can provide short-term storage solutions and pumped-hydro storage can provide long-...

In sub-Saharan Africa, 160 million grid-connected electricity consumers live in countries where hydropower accounts for over 50% of total power supply. A warmer climate with more frequent and intense extremes could result in supply reliability issues. Here, (i) a robust framework to highlight the interdependencies between hydropower, water availabi...

Rainfall extremes including droughts and floods can curtail hydroelectricity generation and undermine electricity supply security. This is particularly relevant where-such as in 23 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa-hydropower represents at least half of the installed capacity, and little backup options are currently available. Here, we assess the abi...

This short open access book investigates the role of renewable energy in East Africa to provide policy-relevant inputs for the achievement of a cost-effective electrification process in the region. For each country, the authors review the current situation in the domestic power sector, adopt a GIS-based approach to plot renewable energy resources p...

Using remotely-sensed Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP)-VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imagery Radiometer Suite) night-time light (NTL) imagery between 2012 and 2016 and electricity consumption data from the IEA World Energy Balance database, we assemble a five-year panel dataset to evaluate if and to what extent NTL data are able to capture...

Nigeria is endowed with substantial amounts of energy resources, and it has been making large profits from their export. However, windfall revenues have also been affecting the Government’s responsiveness and accountability, and they have brought it into collusive relationship with international oil and gas companies operating in the country. A ske...

The sunk cost fallacy results in taking into account unrecoverable past costs in present decision-making. This work aims to study the origins and the main implications of this behaviour, with reference to the underlying theory. The relationship between sunk costs and rational choice theory is analysed and an empirical case study to test some hypoth...