Rosie Day

University of Birmingham · School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

Introduction Despite a decade of policy actions, Ulaanbaatar’s residents continue to be exposed to extreme levels of air pollution, a major public health concern, especially for vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and children. In May 2019, the Mongolian government implemented a raw coal ban (RCB), prohibiting distribution and use of raw...

In this reply to Thaler (2022), we take the opportunity to discuss two main aspects from his piece to continue the discussion: 1) the integration of social and natural sciences data, and 2) the importance of transdisciplinary research. We agree, and highlight that necessary learning, reflections and participation processes are time-intensive for re...

Despite specific historical, geographical, sociodemographic, and infrastructural conditions that in combination could produce very high levels of energy vulnerability, there are significant and enduring knowledge gaps concerning energy poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean. Bringing together a multi-disciplinary and multi-national team, we foc...

In this reply we thank both authors for their thoughtful insights on our original opinion piece “Guiding principles for hydrologists conducting interdisciplinary research and fieldwork with participants.” We believe these discussions will help to inspire and guide current and future researchers and illustrate how to continue to bring together physi...

Interventions to reduce household air pollution (HAP) are key to reducing associated morbidity and mortality in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs); especially among pregnant women and young children. This systematic review aims to determine the effectiveness of interventions aimed to reduce HAP exposure associated with domestic solid biomass...

The significance of using games for educational purposes is well documented in the literature. It has been argued that serious games can draw more engagement and user attention to topics when compared to conventional web or print media, including concepts around energy education. The Smarter Household project has deployed an energy indoor health mo...

It is necessary to combine the understanding of physical environmental drivers with social, economic, cultural and political perspectives and information to build resilience to future flood and drought hazards. We present a flexible collaborative modelling approach to improve resilience to hydrological extremes in large basins with application to t...

Energy poverty is a multidimensional issue and the capability approach is fruitful to show how energy-poor households are restricted in many aspects of well-being. With reference to Nussbaum’s Central Capabilities, and based on qualitative interviews, this contribution aims to illustrate how energy-poor people are limited in five capabilities in th...

Background A variety of public health interventions have been undertaken in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to prevent morbidity and mortality associated with household air pollution (HAP) due to cooking, heating and lighting with solid biomass fuels. Pregnant women and children under five are particularly vulnerable to the effects of HAP,...

Global South communities are increasingly exposed and vulnerable to natural hazards such as floods and droughts. Preparing for future hazards requires developing an idea of an uncertain future, thinking out of the box for possible solutions, enhancing communication between diverse groups, and instigating organisational and behavioural change. In th...

Clean cooking fuels are generally assumed to bring health and other benefits for women compared with solid fuels, which suggests they should be preferred. However, despite the availability of clean cooking fuels, such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), the scale of solid fuel use in rural India remains large. Here we examine women’s positions on fue...

Most research on hydrological risks focuses either on flood risk or drought risk, whilst floods and droughts are two extremes of the same hydrological cycle. To better design disaster risk reduction (DRR) measures and strategies, it is important to consider interactions between these closely linked phenomena. We show examples of: (a) how flood or d...

The Limpopo River Basin (LRB) is highly vulnerable to hydrological extremes (floods and droughts). Groundwater may play an important role in building resilience to hydrological extremes in the Limpopo River Basin (LRB), as an essential resource for sustainable development and already the primary source of water for more than 70% people in the regio...

This paper investigates the relationship between gender and energy poverty as a matter of energy (in)justice. Energy poverty is generally conceived of and measured at the household level, obscuring potential gender differences in the costs and benefits of energy and fuel usage and in access to energy services. Drawing on qualitative work with women...

Water is at the core of many current and future global challenges, which involve hydrological, technical and social processes. Therefore, successful interdisciplinary research on how water-related issues interact with human activities, actions and responses is increasingly important. Qualitative data and diverse perspectives provide much-needed inf...

'Environmental Justice: Key Issues' is the first textbook to offer a comprehensive and accessible overview of environmental justice, one of the most dynamic fields in environmental politics scholarship. The rapidly growing body of research in this area has brought about a proliferation of approaches; as such, the breadth and depth of the field can...

It is necessary to combine the understanding of physical environmental drivers with social, economic, cultural and political perspectives and information to build resilience to future flood and drought hazards. We present a flexible collaborative modelling approach to improve resilience to hydrological extremes in large basins with application to t...

Droughts have severe direct impacts on the livelihoods of rural populations. Thus, the management of water for communal agriculture and water supply should be well coordinated to enhance drought resilience. Notwithstanding the interrelations among water management institutions in South Africa, there are complexities in the way these institutions wo...

Abstract. Global South communities are increasingly exposed and vulnerable to natural hazards such as floods and droughts. Preparing for future extremes requires including diverse knowledges, elevating under-represented voices, thinking out of the box for possible solutions, enhancing communication between diverse groups, and instigating organisati...

In this paper, we make a case for bringing energy geography into closer dialogue with emotional geography, and argue that doing so has the potential to greatly improve our understanding of energy systems and their intersection with everyday life, bringing essential but often overlooked aspects into view. We draw on research carried out as part of a...

This chapter presents the state of the art, the objectives and the research questions of the 2GENDERS research project on energy poverty in Belgium.

To conclude this important research on energy poverty, we first turn back to and answer the four initial research questions that were presented in Chapter 2. By their transversal character, they provide a good way for summarising our findings across the chapters. We then conclude with a call for policies dedicated to fight energy poverty in Belgium...

In 2004, almost half of Indonesian society was dependent on firewood for fuel. Following the implementation of a policy to substitute kerosene use with Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) in 2007, there was a significant improvement in LPG use from 10.5 percent to 47 percent of households, whilst kerosene use fell significantly from 36 to 9 percent from...

Smart metering of domestic energy use allows consumer feedback through in-home displays (IHDs), websites or smart phone apps. Research has illustrated the need for additional 'sense-making' information to help households make informed energy-related decisions. This study investigates how household members respond when energy consumption data is int...

This chapter explores the evolving demand for energy-intensive long distance leisure travel in retirement, a phenomenon which is widely predicted to be on the increase due to demographic change, rising retirement incomes and the retirement of the baby boomer generation, often labelled as the first consumer generation. We undertook serial interviews...

This chapter revisits the whole edited collection with an explicit focus upon research strategies for studying demanding energy. Investigating what energy is for, it argues, involves embedding three methodological priorities into research designs: (1) posing questions that focus upon social dynamics rather than upon energy itself; (2) reflecting up...

This edited collection starts from the question: what social processes constitute and make energy demand? That is, what is energy for? Pursuing this question requires stepping back from energy demand per se to investigate the social practices that contribute to its constitution, patterning and transformation. Drawing in part upon social theories of...

The current rollout of smart meters for gas and electricity, both in the UK and internationally, will help suppliers to better forecast demand and supply accurate bills to consumers. However, even with an in-home display (IHD), the benefits of a smart meter to a domestic customer are limited by the so-called ‘double invisibility’ of energy [1] and...

This paper includes our preliminary findings about user interface design of an interactive and engaging 'home energy dashboard' application to understand energy consumption and indoor environmental conditions while stimulating energy efficiency behaviour and learning to make smart choices. Social housing customers, a social housing provider and a U...

Transformative interdisciplinary methods and tools are required to address crucial water-related challenges facing societies in the current era of the Anthropocene. In a community-based study in the Limpopo basin of South Africa, physical and social science methods were brought together to run interdisciplinary workshops aimed at enhancing prepared...

This edited collection critically engages with an important but rarely-asked question: what is energy for? This starting point foregrounds the diverse social processes implicated in the making of energy demand and how these change over time to shape the past patterns, present dynamics and future trajectories of energy use. Through a series of innov...

This paper explores the creative uses of stories and storytelling to engage groups and individuals with consideration of changes in energy systems across time and place. It summarises three story-based experiments that responded to the theme of ‘energy utopias’. These are drawn from the three core strands of a much wider body of work undertaken wit...

End use energy efficiency and fuel poverty is one of the major issues in the UK social housing sector. It is estimated that about 10% of English households live in fuel poverty.2015 UK greenhouse gas emission final figures show that the net CO2 emission was reduced by 4.1% between 2014 and 2015. This shows that the UK is on course to attain its sec...

This article draws on a serial interview study of later life leisure travel in the UK to question how a wider trend towards holidaying further afield has come to feature in the lives of three cohorts of older Britons. Drawing on theories of social practice that see notions of desirable activity as produced through the interplay of opportunities to...

Emerging and future sustainable energy systems will greatly impact upon landscapes and are likely to require wholesale societal transformation. In Wales, recent policy proposals to achieve decarbonisation prescribe greater roles for local and community energy. However, wider citizen engagement and public discourse on comprehensive energy transforma...

Drought events cause severe water and food insecurities in many developing countries where resilience to natural hazards and change is low due to a number of reasons (including poverty, social and political inequality, and limited access to information). Furthermore, with climate change and increasing pressures from population and societal change,...

This paper considers aspects of spatial justice in the processes of land acquisition for large-scale solar energy projects in the developmentalist context of India. It explores the case of one of the world’s largest solar park projects in Charanka, Gujarat. While the official rhetoric suggests an inclusive project for globally benign renewable ener...

Key points • The modelling used to generate statistics on the extent of fuel poverty depends on calculating required energy expenditure. • There are key differences in the principles of need adopted in relation to different categories of energy use. • These differences need to be recognised, articulated and debated.

Research Insight from work in the DEMAND Centre, Lancaster University

Taking four assumptions in turn, this review article considers some of the lenses through which researchers might look at later life leisure travel and the implications of adopting each of them. First, we consider the ‘active ageing’ agenda and what this means for how leisure travel may be thought about in academia and beyond. Second, we turn to st...

Large scale renewable energy developments, although seen as environmentally good, also have the potential to damage a community’s well-being if the distribution of outcomes of the development, both good and bad, is unfair. Inequality in the distribution of benefits and costs, especially when some sections of a community benefit at the expense of ot...

In this article we conceptualise energy use from a capabilities perspective, informed by the work of Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and others following them. Building on this, we suggest a corresponding definition of energy poverty, as understood in the capabilities space. We argue that such an understanding provides a theoretically coherent means o...

Fuel poverty is now widely recognised in the UK as a distinct form of social inequality and injustice, but exactly which energy-uses and services should be incorporated into conceptualisations of fuel poverty is rarely discussed explicitly. In this paper, we investigate how different energy-uses are portrayed as part of fuel poverty by national...

Access to affordable energy is a core dimension of energy justice, with recent work examining the relation between energy use and well-being in these terms. However, there has been relatively little examination of exactly which energy uses should be considered basic necessities within a given cultural context and so of concern for energy justice. W...

Solar PV is being rolled out on a large scale in India and other emerging economies, but in the enthusiasm for solar's promise of plentiful, low carbon energy, the social and environmental justice concerns accompanying such infrastructure development are in danger of being overlooked. In this context, this paper, using the case study of 'Charanaka...

A recent turn towards a more contextually sensitive apprehension of the challenge of making everyday life less resource hungry has been partly underwritten by widespread evidence that the environmental values people commonly profess to hold do not often translate into correspondingly low impact actions. Yet sometimes the contexts of everyday life c...

This paper proposes a set of criteria for evaluation of serious games (SGs) which are intended as effective methods of engaging energy users and lowering consumption. We discuss opportunities for using SGs in energy research which go beyond existing feedback mechanisms, including use of immersive virtual worlds for learning and testing behaviours,...

This paper is a commentary on the theme of this special issue, low carbon thermal technologies and older age, and the Conditioning Demand project. Drawing on the project findings, I discuss some key aspects of ageing that are relevant to the roll-out of low carbon technologies in domestic settings in ageing, developed societies. These include biolo...

Bringing attention to fuel poverty as a distinct manifestation of social inequality has asserted the place of affordable warmth in the profile of contemporary rights and entitlements. As such, fuel poverty can be understood as an expression of injustice, involving the compromised ability to access energy services and thereby to secure a healthful l...

There is good reason to be interested in how older people in ageing societies organise their winter warmth. Winter mortality rates are highest amongst this group. Several initiatives have accordingly sought to alleviate the fuel poverty some older people experience at this time. Yet many older people are also wealthier than ever. This leads to alte...

Concerns over the welfare of older people in winter have led to interventions and advice campaigns meant to improve their ability to keep warm, but older people themselves are not always willing to follow these recommendations. In this paper we draw on an in-depth study that followed twenty one older person households in the UK over a cold winter a...

Environmental justice discourses have engaged far less with age as a significant factor associated with injustice than with other sociodemographic signifiers such as race and class. In this paper I explore material from an empirical study conducted with older people in three neighbourhoods in Scotland, using a framework based on environmental and s...

This article is concerned with the nature and significance of inequality in the environmental experience of children and young people. We argue that research in this area needs to widen in perspective and address a complex set of environmental attributes that matter to children and young people, and to their development. Discussing a study conducte...

To explore the early responses of young oral cancer patients in Scotland to the symptoms of their emerging condition, to understand the ways they seek help and to inquire into delay caused by not recognising symptoms associated with cancer. The survey was carried out in Maggie's Centres or in patients' own homes in Glasgow and Edinburgh among young...

This article describes a qualitative study exploring the impact of poverty on children’s access to and use of services, which took a comparative approach to gather the views of children from more and less affluent households. Findings suggest affordability and related factors including limited mobility constrained service use for less affluent chil...

This article examines how concepts of place effects are relevant in understanding the public's experience of air pollution. Using qualitative and quantitative data from a case study of four neighbourhoods in north London, the analysis shows how this experience is mediated by multiple aspects of place, which may be seen as overlain. These multiple a...

This article examines the perceived risks to health from traffic-related air pollution among residents of four neighbourhoods in a borough of north London. Drawing on interview and survey data, the first part of the discussion presents views on possible health effects in general terms, and perceived effects on respondents themselves and their famil...

Air quality management is currently receiving attention in the UK, with limit objectives for air pollutants to be met within the next few years. Local authorities must put strategies in place in order to meet these objectives, and this must be done with public consultation. At present, policy decisions rely heavily on scientific and medical informa...

In recent years, both the general public and policy makers have become increasingly concerned about sewage discharges to coastal bathing waters in the United Kingdom and the consequent risk to public health (HMSO, 1994, 1995). The European Commission (EC) Bathing Water Quality Directive of 1976 (CEC, 1976) set out standards for designated bathing w...

This paper investigates the distribution of three common air pollutants, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and fine particulates (PM10), in England and Wales with respect to social class, ethnicity and population density. A multilevel model is used to demonstrate regional differences in the social distribution of pollution. The results show that, a...