Narasimha Desirazu Rao

• PhD
• Professor at Yale University

Northeast China (NEC) as one of the primary breadbaskets of China plays an essential role in achieving sustainable agriculture to provide sufficient and nutritious food while minimizing resource consumption and environmental costs. Growing evidence indicates crop switching is a promising solution for achieving sustainable agriculture. Comprehensive...

Social and environmental agendas are intricately connected and shape the international policy discourse. To support these discussions, we present a framework for interpreting global scenario outcomes on energy demand and supply-side transitions through the lens of societal well-being and minimum resource requirements. We develop and apply a new mod...

Is there a cost to our well-being from increased affluence? Drawing upon responses from 2.05 million U.S. adults from the Gallup Daily Poll from 2008 to 2017 we find that with household income above ~$63,000 respondents are more likely to experience stress. This contrasts with the trend below this threshold, where at higher income the prevalence of...

Household electrification is an important pillar of decarbonization in the US and requires the rapid adoption of electric heat pumps. Household energy models that project adoption rates do not represent these decisions well. To what extent are they limited by fundamental knowledge gaps, or is there scope to incorporate insights from the social scie...

Social and environmental agendas are closely linked and dominate international policy discussions. To support these discussions, we explore how gaps in decent living standards (DLS) could be closed while transitioning to a more desirable climate-friendly and sustainable future. We use a new model called DESIRE (Decent living standards and the Envir...

Social science often relies on surveys of households and individuals. Dozens of such surveys are regularly administered by the U.S. government. However, they field independent, unconnected samples with specialized questions, limiting research questions to those that can be answered by a single survey. The presented data comprise the fusion onto the...

Various technologies and strategies have been proposed to decarbonize the chemical industry. Assessing the decarbonization, environmental, and economic implications of these technologies and strategies is critical to identifying pathways to a more sustainable industrial future. This study reviews recent advancements and integration of systems analy...

The Emissions Gap Report is UNEP's spotlight report launched annually in advance of the annual Climate negotiations. The EGR tracks the gap between where global emissions are heading with current country commitments and where they ought to be to limit warming to 1.5°C. Each edition explores ways to bridge the emissions gap.

Groundwater depletion due to agricultural intensification is a major threat to water and food security in the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP), a critical food bowl, home to 400 million people and currently producing 135 million metric tonnes of cereals. Among the solutions proposed to address this unsustainable water consumption, crop switching has recei...

The relationship between growth, inequality and poverty remains elusive, despite considerable scholarship. To what extent can governments rely on growth to eradicate poverty without reducing inequality? We derive a closed-form relationship between a minimum income threshold, changes in the Gini index of income inequality and average national income...

India is the world’s second largest producer of wheat, with more than 40% increase in production since 2000. Increasing temperatures raise concerns about wheat’s sensitivity to heat. Traditionally-grown sorghum is an alternative rabi (winter season) cereal, but area under sorghum production has declined more than 20% since 2000. We examine sensitiv...

Urbanization, slum redevelopment, and population growth will lead to unprecedented levels of residential building construction in "low- and middle-income" (LMI) countries in the coming decades. However, less than 50% of previous residential building life-cycle assessment (LCA) reviews included LMI countries. Moreover, all reviews that included LMI...

We welcome the analysis of Semieniuk et al. (1) as an additional sensitivity to illustrate a more extreme distribution of regional contributions to climate mitigation investments that supports our main conclusion regarding the North-South divide in mitigation investment capabilities. In response to Semieniuk et al. we would like to first point out...

Concern about the environmental impacts of consumption has drawn research attention to the drivers of conspicuous and luxury (C/L) consumption. Given the prevailing patterns of overconsumption, most studies to date have focused on countries in the global North. However, an emerging high-consuming middle and upper class in nations such as India and...

Current mitigation finance flows are inadequate and unfair

As urban areas are increasingly exposed to high temperatures, lack of access to residential thermal comfort is a challenge with dramatic consequences for human health and well-being. Air-conditioning (AC) can provide relief against heat stress, but a massive AC uptake could entail stark energy demand growth and mitigation challenges. Slums pose add...

Decarbonizing transport is crucial for achieving climate targets, which is challenging because mobility is growing rapidly. Personal mobility is a key societal service and basic need, but currently not available to everyone with sufficient quality and quantity. The basis for mobility and accessibility of desired destinations is infrastructure, but...

Cities are critical to meeting our sustainable energy goals. Informal settlement redevelopment programs represent an opportunity to improve living conditions and curb increasing demand for active cooling. We introduce an energy modeling framework for informal settlements to investigate how building design decisions influence the onset of heat stres...

Material efficiency (ME) can support rapid climate change mitigation and circular economy. Here, we comprehensively assess the circularity of ME strategies for copper use in the U.S. housing services (including residential buildings and major household appliances) by integrating use-phase material and energy demand. Although the ME strategies of mo...

Energy and climate change mitigation analysis rooted in economic relationships alone is largely disconnected from the advancement of well-being. We propose an interdisciplinary research agenda that relates energy use to individual well-being through consumption by building bridges between the social sciences, energy–economic models and climate poli...

Airborne fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is the largest environmental risk factor for premature mortality worldwide, and the probable cause of several hundred thousand premature deaths every year in India. Indian households contribute to ambient PM2.5 directly from several sources, including biomass-burning cook stoves and transport, and indirectly...

In recent years, there has been growing interest in defining what exactly constitutes “decent living standards” (DLS)—the material underpinnings of human well-being. We assess the gaps in providing decent health, shelter, nutrition, socialization, and mobility within countries, across the world. Our results show that more people are deprived of DLS...

Global progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 7.1: ‘By 2030, ensure universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services’ continues to be measured by mere access to energy carriers, using binary indicators that inadequately reflect the multi-dimensional nature of the goal. In this work, we describe and apply an alternative fra...

https://climatestrategies.org/publication/critical-junctions-on-the-journey-to-1-5c-the-decisive-decade/#:~:text=The%20report%2C%20Critical%20Junctions%20on,backed%20approaches%20to%20reducing%20emissions.

This page belonged to the preprint version. Published version now available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac1c27

Sustainability endorses high quality, long-lasting goods. Durable goods, however, often require substantial amounts of energy during their production and use-phase and indirectly through complementary products and services. We quantify the global household's final energy footprints (EFs) of durable goods and the complementary goods needed to operat...

Airborne fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is the most important environmental risk factor for premature mortality worldwide, and the likely cause of several hundred thousand premature deaths every year in India. Indian households also contribute to ambient PM2.5 to different extents from a number of sources, including biomass-burning cook stoves, tr...

Globally, India's population is amongst the most severely impacted by nutrient deficiency, yet millions of tonnes of food are lost along the supply chain before reaching consumers. Across food groups, grains represent the largest share of daily calories and overall losses by mass in India. This study quantifies energy input to minimise storage loss...

Existing indicators used to track progress towards achieving target 7.1 of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) narrowly interpret energy poverty as a lack of connections. Recently proposed measurement frameworks are multidimensional, but complex and conceptually muddled. We propose an alternative framework that simplifies and distinguishes two...

It is increasingly clear that averting ecological breakdown will require drastic changes to contemporary human society and the global economy embedded within it. On the other hand, the basic material needs of billions of people across the planet remain unmet. Here, we develop a simple, bottom-up model to estimate a practical minimal threshold for t...

The energy–water–land nexus represents a critical leverage future policies must draw upon to reduce trade-offs between sustainable development objectives. Yet, existing long-term planning tools do not provide the scope or level of integration across the nexus to unravel important development constraints. Moreover, existing tools and data are not al...

Energy demand in global climate scenarios is typically derived for sectors – such as buildings, transportation, and industry – rather than from underlying services that could drive energy use in all sectors. This limits the potential to model household consumption and lifestyles as mitigation options through their impact on economy-wide energy dema...

For over 30 years, researchers have tried to estimate how much energy societies require to provide for everyone’s basic needs. This question gains importance with climate change, because global scenarios of climate stabilization assume strong reductions in energy demand growth in developing countries. Here, we estimate bottom-up the energy embodied...

Significance Substantial growth in food production has occurred from a narrowing diversity of crops over the last 50 y. Agricultural policies have largely focused on the single objective of maximizing production with less attention given to nutrition, climate, and environment. Decisions about sustainable food systems require quantifying and assessi...

The energy-water-land nexus represents a critical leverage future policies must draw upon to reduce trade-offs between sustainable development objectives. Yet, existing long-term planning tools do not provide the scope or level of integration across the nexus to unravel important development constraints. Moreover, existing tools and data are not al...

Fluctuations in temperature and precipitation influence crop productivity across the planet. With episodes of extreme climate becoming increasingly frequent, buffering crop production against these stresses is a critical aspect of climate adaptation. In India, where grain production and diets are closely linked, national food supply is sensitive to...

With growing health risks from rising temperatures in the Global South, the lack of essential indoor cooling is increasingly seen as a dimension of energy poverty and human well-being. Air conditioning (AC) is expected to increase significantly with rising incomes, but it is likely that many who need AC will not have it. We estimate the current loc...

Energy systems support technical solutions fulfilling the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal for clean water and sanitation (SDG6), with implications for future energy demands and greenhouse gas emissions. The energy sector is also a large consumer of water, making water efficiency targets ingrained in SDG6 important constraints for long-...

Agriculture contributes 18% of India's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Yet, little is known about the energy requirements of individual crops, making it difficult to link nutrition-enhancing dietary changes to energy consumption and climate change. We estimate the energy and CO2 intensity of food grains (rice, wheat, sorghum, maize, pearl millet an...

In the version of ‘Supplementary Data 1’ originally published with this Article, the units for the ‘Capacity|Electricity|*’ variables in the ‘Non_Investment_Annual’ tab were incorrectly given as EJ/yr; they should have read GW. This has now been corrected. Also, some of the variables listed in the ‘Non_Investment_Variable_Defs’ were not required an...

Background: Production of rice and wheat increased dramatically in India over the past decades, with reduced proportion of coarse cereals in the food supply. Objective: We assess impacts of changes in cereal consumption in India on intake of iron and other micronutrients and whether increased consumption of coarse cereals could help alleviate an...

This paper presents global scenarios of future national Gini coefficients, based on an econometric model of the evolution of income inequality within countries over the last three decades. These projections are defined within the scenario framework of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) in climate research, in which income inequality is a quali...

More than 60 million homes in India are unfit for decent living. Replacing this stock with decent housing will entail significant costs and increase energy consumption and related CO2 emissions due to both upfront and long-term energy requirements. This paper assesses the life cycle costs (LCC), life cycle energy (LCE) and CO2 emissions impacts of...

This paper illustrates the use of life cycle assessment (LCA) methods to link human wellbeing to resource consumption. Based on a previously developed framework of the material requirements for human well-being, we use LCA and Input-Output (I/O) analysis, as appropriate, to estimate the life-cycle energy needed to meet the gap in living standards i...

We define a set of universal, irreducible and essential set of material conditions for achieving basic human wellbeing, along with indicators and quantitative thresholds, which can be operationalized for societies based on local customs and preferences. We draw support for this decent living standard (DLS) from different accounts of basic justice,...

As a significant emitter of greenhouse gases, but also as a developing country starting from a low emissions base, India is an important actor in global climate change mitigation. However, perceptions of India vary widely, from an energy-hungry climate deal-breaker to a forerunner of a low carbon future. Developing clarity on India's energy and emi...

Low-carbon investments are necessary for driving the energy system transformation that is called for by both the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals. Improving understanding of the scale and nature of these investments under diverging technology and policy futures is therefore of great importance to decision makers. Here, using six gl...

The Central American nations of Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua are among the poorest in the Americas. While the fraction of population dependent on solid fuels has declined in these nations over the last 25 years, the number of people using them has risen. Here, we first assess current patterns of cooking energy use in these nations. We then app...

Example demand curve for LPG in Guatemala for the U2 expenditure group. (PDF)

Fuel price trajectory by country (2010 $/GJFE–Giga Joule of final energy). (DOCX)

R code for household cooking demand model and analysis. (DOCX)

Population projection in millions by expenditure group. (DOCX)

Additional scenario results on share of population using different stoves. (DOCX)

Schematic overview of model and data sources. (PDF)

Income projection by expenditure group in 2010$ per capita. (DOCX)

Stove costs and attributes. (DOCX)

Scenarios that limit global warming to 1.5 °C describe major transformations in energy supply and ever-rising energy demand. Here, we provide a contrasting perspective by developing a narrative of future change based on observable trends that results in low energy demand. We describe and quantify changes in activity levels and energy intensity in t...

Understanding the interplay between multiple climate change risks and socioeconomic development is increasingly required to inform effective actions to manage these risks and pursue sustainable development. We calculate a set of 14 impact indicators at different levels of global mean temperature (GMT) change and socioeconomic development covering w...

Research on climate change mitigation tends to focus on supply-side technology solutions. A better understanding of demand-side solutions is missing. We propose a transdisciplinary approach to identify demand-side climate solutions, investigate their mitigation potential, detail policy measures and assess their implications for well-being.

India has among the highest lost years of life from micronutrient deficiencies. We investigate what dietary shifts would eliminate protein, iron, zinc and Vitamin A deficiencies within households’ food budgets and whether these shifts would be compatible with mitigating climate change. This analysis uses the National Sample Survey (2011–12) of cons...

Two of the biggest global challenges we face today are mitigating climate change and economic inequality. Some research suggests these goals are in conflict, based largely on the observation that a dollar spent at higher income levels is less carbon intensive than at lower income levels. We put this concern to rest. We quantify this effect in its m...

Research on climate change mitigation tends to focus on supply-side technology solutions. A better understanding of demand-side solutions is missing. We propose a transdisciplinary approach to identify demand-side climate solutions, investigate their mitigation potential, detail policy measures, and assess their implications for well-being.

As climate change progresses, the risk of adverse impacts on vulnerable populations is growing. As governments seek increased and drastic action, policymakers are likely to seek quantification of climate-change impacts and the consequences of mitigation policies on these populations. Current models used in climate research have a limited ability to...

We develop a methodology to characterize and quantify uncertainty in relating consumption to production in household energy footprints. This uncertainty arises primarily from inconsistencies between national accounts and household surveys and, to a smaller extent, from using aggregated sectors. Researchers may introduce significant inaccuracies by...

Developing countries face a crisis of deteriorating and unsafe human settlements conditions. Few studies examine the resources and energy required to provide everybody with decent housing. This study presents a generic methodology for the estimation of Life Cycle Energy (LCE) requirements to meet the housing gap and provide basic comfort to everybo...

Will everybody want and have a refrigerator, television and washing machine as incomes rise? Considerable uncertainty surrounds the likely increase in energy consumption and carbon emissions from rising incomes among the world's poor. We examine drivers of and predict appliance ownership using machine learning and other techniques with household su...

Infrastructure services are essential to human development. Yet, the drivers of service access at a global scale remain largely unexplored. This paper presents trends and global patterns in access to water, sanitation, electricity, and telephony services. Using a panel data set from 1990 to 2010, we empirically explore plausible determinants of acc...

A subset of Sustainable Development Goals pertains to improving people's living standards at home. These include the provision of access to electricity, clean cooking energy, improved water and sanitation. We examine historical progress in energy access in relation to other living standards. We assess regional patterns in the pace of progress and r...

Municipal water systems provide crucial services for human well-being, and will undergo a major transformation this century following global technological, socioeconomic and environmental changes. Future demand scenarios integrating these drivers over multi-decadal planning horizons are needed to develop effective adaptation strategies. This paper...

It is often argued that, ethically, resource rents should accrue to all citizens. Yet, in reality, the rents from exploiting national resources are often concentrated in the hands of a few. If resource rents were to be taxed, on the other hand, substantial amounts of public money could be raised and used to cover the population's infrastructure nee...

Introducing a price on greenhouse gas emissions would not only contribute to reducing the risk of dangerous anthropogenic climate change, but would also generate substantial public revenues. Some of these revenues could be used to cover investment needs for infrastructure providing access to water, sanitation, electricity, telecommunications, and t...

Highlights: Survey data verifies the multi-dimensional nature of electricity access; Energy poverty metrics should be distinguished from electricity supply metrics; Composite indices can bias or hide complexity of electricity service conditions; Data indicates better tier performance of solar home systems than from grid access; Metric analysis stre...

Household air pollution from traditional cook stoves presents a greater health hazard than any other environmental factor. Despite government efforts to support clean-burning cooking fuels, over 700 million people in South Asia could still rely on traditional stoves in 2030. This number could rise if climate change mitigation efforts increase energ...

Energy consumption is necessary for the delivery of human development by supporting access to basic needs, services and infrastructure. Given prevailing technologies and the high degree of inertia in practical rates of decarbonisation, growth in energy consumption from rising global living standards may drive consequent greenhouse gas emissions (GH...

What should India put forward as the mitigation component of its climate contribution (or ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contribution’ (INDC))? Since energy accounts for 77% of India’s greenhouse gas emissions, this question can only be answered as one part of a larger discussion about India’s energy future. This study conducts a comparative rev...

Measuring energy access through binary indicators is insufficient, and often, even misleading. In this work, the SE4ALL global tracking framework, and the recently introduced ESMAP multi-tier approach, is critically discussed analyzing questionnaire based primary data from rural Bangladesh. The performance of different energy interventions is evalu...

It is often argued that, ethically, resource rents should accrue to all citizens. Yet in reality the rents from exploiting national resources are often concentrated in the hands of a few. If resource rents were to be taxed, on the other hand, substantial amounts of public money could be raised and used to cover the population’s infrastructure needs...

Raising basic living standards and growing affluence aren’t equivalent, and neither are their respective climate impacts.