Sergio Tirado-Herrero

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid | UAM · Department of Geography

Energy poverty is a far-reaching concept that intrinsically bridges numerous fields of study, ranging from engineering to anthropology and medical science to social psychology. The profound implications of energy poverty on the quality of life globally have also led to a wide range of metrics and policies aimed at measuring it and alleviating it, a...

To effectively navigate out of the climate crisis, a new interdisciplinary approach is needed to guide and facilitate research that integrates diverse understandings of how transitions evolve in intertwined social–environmental systems. The concept of tipping points, frequently used in the natural sciences and increasingly in the social sciences, c...

Throughout the last decade, the goal of acknowledging and alleviating energy poverty has made its way to the core of energy policies across the world, including the high-standing SDG7 as a benchmark. While much debate is still devoted to conceptual and empirical clarifications, its measurement through indicators, or the appropriate policies aimed a...

Socio-technical transitions have garnered significant attention in recent years. Both in theory and practice, however, concerns have been raised about the elitist character of low-carbon transitions. Such dynamics are predominantly imagined through core-periphery relationships. More recently, calls to ‘decentre’ transitions draw attention to the so...

El acceso equitativo a la energía y a la vivienda es una preocupación básica de la justicia social. A pesar de los numerosos vínculos entre estos dos bienes esenciales, los marcos teóricos de la justicia y la pobreza energética se han referido casi exclusivamente a la cuestión de la vivienda en términos de la eficiencia energética de los edificios...

El cambio climático antropogénico es hoy una realidad incontestable. Una realidad que, si no lo es ya, se convertirá en los próximos años en el mayor desafío reconocido que haya tenido jamás la humanidad. El derretimiento de los glaciares, la subida del nivel del mar y el aumento de eventos meteorológicos extremos como los ciclones, las inundacione...

It is proven that children experience specific impacts on their mental and physical health as well as their educational attainment as a result of living in energy poverty. International guidelines and requirements underline the right of every child to an adequate standard of living and the need for all policy to take children into account. This pap...

EU funding agency for research and innovation networks (www.cost.eu). COST Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. ENGAGER brings together a diverse and extensive body of stakeholders to help understand and address the energy poverty challenge. ENGAGER consi...

Energy poverty is a socio-environmental challenge of urban significance that has been seldom explored quantitatively at the city scale as most indicator-based analyses are conducted at national or regional levels. Acknowledging this gap in the energy poverty literature, this chapter leverages a unique set of quantitative data sources available for...

Hungary has one of the highest incidences of energy poverty in the European Union, and a high share of Hungarian low-income households rely on solid fuels. This paper first maps the energy vulnerabilities of Hungarian solid fuel users using six energy vulnerability factors. The mapping underlines that solid fuel users are more exposed to energy vul...

The present work aims to describe and analyze the results of the interventions carried out in the Barcelona pilot site of the EmpowerMed project. The overall objective of EmpowerMed is to tackle energy poverty and to help improve the health of people in coastal areas of Mediterranean countries, with a particular focus on women. The main support app...

Despite the European Union’s declared commitment to gender equality, women are invisible in the EU’s flagship European Green Deal, which risks turning the gender gap into a chasm and delaying the transition to sustainability, concludes our new report Why the European Green Deal needs ecofeminism. The report, launched by WECF and the European Enviro...

Energy poverty is emerging as a national agenda in the Netherlands. Local authority leadership and action on this agenda, and European Union reporting requirements around the energy transition have aligned to create an opportunity to establish a national agenda on this issue. Early action on energy poverty by local authorities stemmed from their re...

Household energy services account for a large percentage of global final energy use and of carbon emission reduction potentials. Phasing out solid fuels is expected to contribute to the low-carbon energy transition while delivering health and environmental co-benefits. Poland, a coal-based country where nearly half of the population relies on solid...

Big data analysis is becoming an increasing field of interest for research to analyse, identify and predict final user's behaviour. For this reason, in the energy sector, smart metering is generally used to find new business opportunities and, theoretically, it is said that it could also help to fight energy poverty issues. Nonetheless, when tackli...

This policy brief is part of the ENGAGER 2017-2021 Action, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). COST is a funding agency for research and innovation networks. COST Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. ENGAGER brings together...

Energy poverty, a condition whereby people cannot secure adequate home energy services, is gaining prominence in public discourse and on political and policy agendas. As its measurement is operationalised, metrical developments are being socially shaped. A European Union mandate for biennial reporting on energy poverty presents an opportunity to in...

Energy poverty (EP) is a growing problem in the European Union (EU) that affects the population's health. EP is structurally determined by broader political and socioeconomic conditions. Our aims were to analyze the configuration of these determinants in each EU-27 country through the creation of a structural energy poverty vulnerability (SEPV) ind...

This article focuses on the emergence of ‘low‐carbon’ gentrification as a distinct urban phenomenon, a process that we see as the outcome of efforts to change the social and spatial composition of urban districts under the pretext of responding to climate change and energy efficiency imperatives. The article develops a conceptual framework for scru...

Smart home technologies (SHTs) enable new ways of using and managing energy in the domestic sphere. This paper interrogates their contribution to the ambitious carbon emissions reduction efforts required under the 1.5°C mitigation pathway set by the Paris Agreement and their suitability for energy poverty alleviation goals. In contrast to aspiratio...

The widespread recognition of energy poverty as a distinct societal and policy challenge in the EU has resulted in a surge in the number and complexity of energy poverty metrics. Drawing from the body of white and grey literature on domestic energy deprivation indicators now available, the paper offers a review-based discussion on the risks of uncr...

The on-going transition towards low-carbon forms of energy provision (frequently termed ‘energy transitions’) has triggered far-reaching material, economic and institutional reconfigurations at the global scale. There is evidence to suggest that energy transitions increase the social vulnerability of actors involved in and affected by them, includi...

Academics and policy-makers alike are becoming increasingly interested in the wider societal implications of situations where a lack of domestic ‘energy services’ is systemic and pervasive. Energy services are commonly understood as the ‘benefits that energy carriers produce for human well being’ (Modi et al., 2005, page 9). Social science research...

Falling real incomes, rising utility prices and the historically poor thermal quality of the housing stock are some of the main factors that have driven the rise of systemic injustices surrounding energy poverty in the post-communist states of Eastern and Central Europe (ECE). We undertake a socio-spatial and temporal assessment of energy poverty i...

Despite clear indications about its significance, a systematic examination of the connection between the European debt crisis and domestic energy affordability trends is still missing in the academic and policy literature. This paper seeks to provide an empirically-grounded investigation of crisis and austerity as macro-scale driving factors of ene...

Energy poverty can be understood as the inability of a household to secure a socially and materially necessitated level of energy services in the home. While the condition is widespread across Europe, its spatial and social distribution is highly uneven. In this paper, the existence of a geographical energy poverty divide in the European Union (EU)...

This paper focuses on the embeddedness of energy poverty – understood as the inability to secure a socially and materially necessitated level of energy services in the home – in the socio-technical legacies inherited from past development trajectories, as well as broader economic and institutional landscapes. Using Hungary as an example, we explore...

This paper reports the results of recent conceptual and empirical work on energy poverty in Europe, undertaken under the auspices of the European Research Council-funded EVALUATE (‘Energy Vulnerability and Urban Transitions in Europe’) project. Our group understands energy poverty as the inability of a household to secure a socially- and materially...

Co-benefits rarely enter quantitative decision-support frameworks, often because the methodologies for their integration are lacking or not known. This review fills in this gap by providing comprehensive methodological guidance on the quantification of co-impacts and their integration into climate-related decision making based on the literature. Th...

Energy poverty can be understood as the inability of a household to secure a socially- and materially-necessitated level of energy services in the home (Bouzarovski, 2014). While the condition is widespread across Europe, its spatial and social distribution is highly uneven – a disparity that is increasingly described with the aid of the term ‘ener...

This paper charts the emergent body of new approaches towards the research and amelioration of energy deprivation in the home. It starts from the premise that all forms of energy and fuel poverty – in developed and developing countries alike – are underpinned by a common condition: the inability to attain a socially- and materially-necessitated lev...

Fuel (or energy) poverty is understood as a situation in which a household is unable to afford an adequate amount of domestic energy services and/or is forced to pay a disproportionate share of its income on domestic energy. Taking Hungary as a representative case study, the paper first presents relevant indicators which indicate that 10to 30% of t...

Fuel poverty is a combined social and energy challenge with important climate change implications still insufficiently researched in most of the formerly socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It is also believed that deep retrofits of residential buildings, conducted for climate change mitigation or other purposes, are able to el...

Fuel poverty is a still insufficiently researched social and energy challenge with significant climate change implications. Based on evidence from Hungarian panel apartment blocks connected to district heating, this paper introduces a new variant of fuel poverty that may not be properly captured by existing fuel poverty indicators. This newly defin...

Traditional production systems in the Sahel are based on the integration of activities sharing and competing for renewable resources (water and soil fertility) under threat of desertification. A framework of relationships ranking from conflict to collaboration between human groups devoted to agriculture and pastoralism has been developed throughout...

El año que ahora se cierra ha sido testigo de un cierto cambio de rumbo en la política ambiental. La nueva orientación del Gobierno socialista, por un lado, y la presión exterior, por otro, se han manifestado en algunos cambios significativos en distintos ámbitos medioambientales. Destacan entre ellos la política hidráulica y la referida al cambio...