Subhrendu K Pattanayak

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Duke University

Energy access is often considered a catalyst for development. Yet, the binary classification of household electrification misses important variation in service quality and in how households use electricity. To examine the benefits of household electrification and illustrate the importance of using more nuanced classifications of energy access, this...

Burning tropical forests to establish lucrative agricultural crops ignores potentially important health externalities of the resulting air pollution. These health externalities are often poorly understood, especially if other environmental hazards, such as indoor pollution, are not taken into account. Given the potential for joint, contemporaneous...

India faces significant air quality challenges, contributing to local health and global climate concerns. Despite a national ban on agricultural residue burning and various incentive schemes, farmers in northern India continue to face difficulties in curbing open-field burning. Using data from 1021 farming households in rural Punjab in India, we ex...

Gender equity is connected to modern energy services in many ways, but quantitative empirical work on these connections is limited. We examine the relationship between a multi-dimensional measure of women’s empowerment and access to improved cookstoves, clean fuels, and electricity. We use the World Bank Multi-Tier Framework survey datasets from se...

Until recently, the price of electricity in Ethiopia was among the lowest in the world. Such low prices have contributed to a substantial financial deficit for the government-owned electric utility and led to a degradation in the quality of electricity services delivered to customers. In December 2018, the utility increased the electricity tariff t...

In low-income countries such as Ethiopia, pre-paid metering is often argued to alleviate several challenges with traditional electricity billing systems, including high non-payment rate, pilferage and fraud, administrative and enforcement costs for utilities, and inflexibility and incongruence of bills with poorer consumers' irregular income. Despi...

Affordability is a major barrier to the adoption of clean energy technologies in low-income countries, which is partly why many governments provide subsidies to offset some of the upfront (installation) costs. However, simple administrative rules might not fully account for economic geography, resulting in lower subsidies for remote areas. Using re...

Despite the importance of safe sanitation and hygiene for sustainable development and public health, approximately half of India's rural population lacks access to safely managed sanitation. Policies prioritizing improved sanitation access have accelerated coverage, yet barriers to universal access and use remain. In this paper, we investigate how...

One third of the world's population lacks access to improved sanitation facilities with ramifications for health, human well-being, and economic development. Although household latrines offer a relatively cheap technological solution, initiatives for universal coverage have fallen short of their goals. In this paper, we analyze a unique panel datas...

Due to worsening air quality across many cities in developing countries, there is an urgent need to consider more aggressive air pollution control measures. Valuation of the benefits of clean air is crucial for establishing the rationale for such policies, but is methodologically challenging, often expensive, and therefore remains limited. This stu...

Programs implemented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are often more effective than comparable efforts by other actors, yet relatively little is known about how implementer identity drives final outcomes. By combining a stratified field experiment in India with a tripledifferences estimation strategy, we show that a local development NGO's...

Biogas has the potential to satisfy the clean energy needs of millions of households in under-served and energy-poor rural areas, while reducing both private and social costs linked to (i) fuels for household cooking, (ii) fertilizers, (iii) pressure on forests, and (iv) emissions (e.g., PM2.5 and methane) that damage both household health and glob...

Three billion people around the world lack access to affordable and reliable clean cooking energy. The case for clean energy has largely been built around health and or environmental benefits, neglecting potentially sizeable benefit(s): when households have clean energy, they can save time and reduce drudgery. Clean energy can reduce poverty. But h...

We study the implementation of a time-varying pricing (TVP) program by a major electricity utility in Costa Rica. Because of particular features of the data, we use recently developed understanding of the two-way fixed effects differences-in-differences estimator along with event-study specifications to interpret our results. Similar to previous re...

In many developing countries, electricity consumers experience frequent supply interruptions, leading to high coping costs and stifled investment, which contribute to energy poverty. In 2019, we implemented stated preference experiments to estimate households' preferences for improved electricity supply for a nationally representative sample of urb...

While protected areas (PA) remain a key conservation strategy globally, their performance is likely shaped by the socio-political context in which they exist. Although decentralization is a good example of such a contextual phenomenon in multiple locations globally, it is rare to find quantitative empirical analyses of how it moderates PA effective...

The sheer scope of the global energy poverty challenge has motivated many organizations to promote off-grid solar energy for lighting, heating, and cooking needs around the world. However, the design and implementation of projects depends on the enabling environment - a constellation of financial, market, program, and regulatory factors. We conduct...

Energy has been called the "golden thread" that connects economic growth, social equity and environmental sustainability, but important knowledge gaps exist on the impacts of low-and middle-income country energy interventions and transitions. This study offers perhaps the broadest characterization to date of the patterns and consistency in quantita...

Background: The natural environment provides multiple ecosystem services, and thus welfare benefits. In particular, it is known that different ecosystems, such as forests, contribute to human health through different ecological interactions, and that degradation of these natural ecosystems have been linked to the emergence and re-emergence of infec...

Planetary health solutions that protect the environment and promote development have been hard to find. Eco-certification of palm oil that restricts fires also reduces local poverty in Indonesia, but only in communities integrated into the market.

Flooding is a frequent natural disaster, which is predicted to intensify over time because of climate change. As more than half the world lives in urban spaces, flooding could devastate urban populations, especially if the infrastructure to cope with flooding is inadequate. We study flooding in Cuttack, Odisha, a typical Indian city subject to annu...

REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) encompasses a range of incentives for developing countries to slow, halt and reverse forest loss and associated forest carbon emissions. Where there is high dependence on biomass energy, cleaner cooking transitions are key to REDD+'s success. Given the poor track record of efforts...

Poor sanitation has large negative impacts on environmental quality, health, and well-being. Sanitation infrastructure is particularly lacking in India, where in 2011, 66% of households did not own a toilet. Inadequate sanitation is a large contributor to diarrheal-related diseases, which cause 300,000 deaths in Indian children each year. We exploi...

Biomass-burning improved cookstoves (ICS) are often seen as a promising intermediate technology solution along the path of household transition to cleaner cooking. This study reports on the results of an experimental evaluation of a carbon finance-enabled program conducted in rural villages in Rajasthan, India. Half (or 20) of 40 purposively-select...

We study the implementation of a time-varying pricing (TVP) program by a major electric utility in Costa Rica. Similar to previous research, we find that the program reduces consumption during peak-hours. However, in contrast with previous research, we find that the program increases total consumption. To explain the differences between our results...

Rural electrification (RE) is a core component of the Sustainable Development Goals and a major focal point of the global development community. Despite this focus, more than one billion people worldwide lack access to electricity, and electrification rates need to more than quadruple to meet international goals. We believe that lack of progress is...

Diarrheal illnesses and acute respiratory infections are among the top causes for premature death and disability across the developing world, and adoption of various technologies for avoiding these illnesses remains extremely low. We exploit data from a unique contingent valuation experiment to consider whether households in rural Rajasthan are unw...

Objective: To evaluate the long-term impact of a community-led total sanitation campaign in rural India. Methods: Local organizations in Odisha state, India worked with researchers to evaluate a community-led total sanitation campaign, which aimed to increase the demand for household latrines by raising awareness of the social costs of poor sani...

Significance Three billion people rely on traditional stoves and solid fuels. These energy use patterns exacerbate the global climate crisis (via increased carbon emissions) and forest degradation/deforestation (via daily fuelwood collection), and expose billions to toxic air pollution generated by dirty fuels. Widespread adoption of improved cooks...

Natural capital will be depleted rapidly and excessively if the long-term, offsite impacts of depletion are ignored. By examining the case of tropical forest burning, we illustrate such myopia: Pursuit of short-term economic gains results in air pollution that causes long-term, irreversible health impacts. We integrate longitudinal data on prenatal...

Agricultural expansion into tropical forests is believed to bring local economic benefits at the expense of global environmental costs. The resulting tension is reflected in Brazilian government policy. The national agrarian reform program has settled farm families in the Amazon region since the 1970s, with the expectation that they will clear fore...

Many decision-makers are looking to science to clarify how nature supports human well-being. Scientists' responses have typically focused on empirical models of the provision of ecosystem services (ES) and resulting decision-support tools. Although such tools have captured some of the complexities of ES, they can be difficult to adapt to new situat...

Improved cookstoves and fuels, such as advanced gasifier stoves, carry the promise of improving health outcomes, preserving local environments, and reducing climate-forcing air pollutants. However, low adoption and use of these stoves in many settings has limited their benefits. We aimed to improve the understanding of improved stove use by describ...

We examine the role of subnational institutions in carbon sequestration and assess whether community forest user groups can meet both existing forest needs and international carbon demand. By conducting a qualitative evaluation of a pilot program in Nepal that made carbon payments to forest user groups, we examine if community forestry institutions...

Although several factors contribute to low rates of access to improved water and sanitation in the developing world, it is especially important to understand and measure household demand for these services. One valuable source of information regarding demand is the growing empirical literature that has applied stated preference methods to estimate...

Several recent initiatives such as Planetary Health, EcoHealth and One Health claim that human health depends on flourishing natural ecosystems. However, little has been said about the operational and implementation challenges of health-oriented conservation actions on the ground. We contend that ecological–epidemiological research must be compleme...

The authors examine whether high personal discount rates help explain why and which households in developing countries under-invest in seemingly low-cost options to avert environmental health threats, including bednets, clean cooking fuels, individual household latrines, water treatment and handwashing. First, the authors elicit personal discount r...

Climate change mitigation in developing countries is increasingly expected to generate co-benefits that help meet sustainable development goals. This has been an expectation and a hotly contested issue in REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) since its inception. While the core purpose of REDD+ is to reduce carbon emi...

Clean cooking has emerged as a major concern for global health and development because of the enormous burden of disease caused by traditional cookstoves and fires. The World Health Organization has developed new indoor air quality guidelines that few homes will be able to achieve without replacing traditional methods with modern clean cooking tech...

America. The policy review addresses the issue of sustainable energy from two different perspectives. One approach considers energy in its broad spectrum and as a national sector of relevance, while the other one focuses on the relevance of implementing sustainable energies under a climate change context (EEfD 2016) 1. Despite the difficulty of sep...

Traditional cooking using biomass is associated with ill health, local environmental degradation, and regional climate change. Clean stoves (liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), biogas, electric) are heralded as a solution, but few studies have demonstrated their environmental health benefits cial impacts in field settings on environmental health endpoin...

Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity, and we are only starting to address it. Climate change scenarios indicate that poor people in developing countries will be particularly negatively affected, e.g. by increased temperature reducing their harvests or flooding due to sea-level rise and extreme weather events. There are also expe...

In this paper we discuss how three criteria – carbon effectiveness, cost efficiency, and equity and co-benefits – can be incorporated in the experimental design for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). We discuss how additional design components can be introduced using a propensity score matching method in pre-selected stud...

Despite widespread global efforts to promote clean cookstoves to achieve improvements in air and forest quality, and to reduce global climate change, surprisingly little is known about the degree to which these actually reduce biomass fuel consumption in real-world settings. Using data from in-house weighing of fuel conducted in rural India, we exa...

Traditional energy technologies and consumer products contribute to household well-being in diverse ways but also often harm household air quality. We review the problem of household air pollution at a global scale, focusing particularly on the harmful effects of traditional cooking and heating. Drawing on the theory of household production, we ill...

Mangroves provide multiple ecosystem services such as blue carbon sequestration, storm protection, and unique habitat for species. Despite these services, mangroves are being lost at rapid rates around the world. Using the best available biophysical and socio-economic data, we present the first rigorous large-scale evaluation of the effectiveness o...

Because emissions from solid fuel burning in traditional stoves impact global climate change, the regional environment, and household health, there is today real interest in improved cook stoves (ICS). Nonetheless, surprisingly little is known about what households like about these energy products. We report on preferences for biomass-burning ICS a...

Reducing emissions for deforestation and forest degradation (REDD and REDD+) is an international mechanism for mitigating climate change impacts. The ambitiously designed architecture that makes REDD+ win-win for high emitting developed countries and forest rich developing countries has led to high hopes and expectations as well as a fear of failur...

Worldwide, over 2.5 billion people lack access to basic sanitation, a situation that contributes to 2 million annual diarrhea-related child deaths and substantial morbidity. Yet rigorous evaluations of sanitation behaviors and their health and welfare impacts are rare. This article uses a randomized sanitation promotion campaign in Orissa, India, t...

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) is a regional intergovernmental learning and knowledge sharing centre serving the eight regional member countries of the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region-Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan. Our aim is to influence policy and practices to...

Earth's natural systems represent a growing threat to human health. And yet, global health has mainly improved as these changes have gathered pace. What is the explanation? As a Commission, we are deeply concerned that the explanation is straightforward and sobering: we have been mortgaging the health of future generations to realise economic and d...

Quasi-experimental methods increasingly are used to evaluate the impacts of conservation interventions by generating credible estimates of counterfactual baselines. These methods generally require large samples for statistical comparisons, presenting a challenge for evaluating innovative policies implemented within a few pioneering jurisdictions. S...

Payments for environmental services (PES) are often viewed as a way to simultaneously improve conservation outcomes and the wellbeing of rural households who receive the payments. However, evidence for such win-win outcomes has been elusive. We add to the growing literature on conservation program impacts by using primary household survey data to e...

In response to unsustainable timber production in tropical forest concessions, voluntary forest management certification programs such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) have been introduced to improve environmental, social, and economic performance over existing management practices. However, despite the proliferation of forest certification...

Water purification might be the most frequently invoked example of an economically valuable ecosystem service, yet the impacts of upstream land use on downstream municipal water treatment costs remain poorly understood. This is especially true in developing countries, where rates of deforestation are highest and cost-effective expansion of safe wat...

Significance Nature threads the very fabric of human lives in remote forest areas of developing countries. Unfortunately, we do not fully understand how ecosystem services (such as human health benefits) could be secured by conserving natural capital. Thus, we analyze a rich dataset on disease, climate, demography, land uses, and conservation polic...

Significance Research shows how the potential services from ecosystem conservation can be modeled, mapped, and valued; however, this integrative research has not been systematically applied to estimate the actual impacts of programs on the delivery of ecosystem services. We bridge this divide by showing how protected areas in Brazil, Costa Rica, In...

Paying communities to preserve and manage their local forest resources using the internationally recognized REDD+ approach can be a practical and effective way to combat climate change. A ‘before-and-after’ and ‘with-and-without’ evaluation of a pilot program in Nepal indicates that REDD+ can contribute to carbon sequestration and improve forest ma...

This paper examines the role of national and sub-national institutions in managing carbon sequestration and trade in Nepal. It first asks whether it is feasible and advantageous to implement REDD+ in Nepal’s community managed forests. Then, using a pilot experimental program, it assesses whether community institutions can serve both existing needs...

Despite the potential of improved cookstoves to reduce the adverse environmental and health impacts of solid fuel use, their adoption and use remains low. Social marketing-with its focus on the marketing mix of promotion, product, price, and place-offers a useful way to understand household behaviors and design campaigns to change biomass fuel use....

Highly advanced, community-level drinking water treatment facilities are increasingly seen as water supply solutions in locations where piped in-house water systems are nonexistent or unreliable. These systems utilize combined technologies, such as advanced filtration plus ultraviolet disinfection or reverse osmosis, which are known to be highly ef...

Integrating conservation and development is central to the mission of many protected areas in the tropics, yet there is limited empirical evidence on the effectiveness of alternative strategies for ICDPs (Integrated Conservation and Development Projects). We evaluate an enterprise-based conservation strategy in a high-profile and well-funded ICDP i...

BACKGROUND: Recent evidence supports that traditional cooking techniques or biomass burning are associated with adverse health consequences, stress on the local environment, and potentially regional climate change. Limited studies have evaluated the potential benefits of ICS technology in this rural setting. OBJECTIVES: Determine the impact of us...

An age-old conflict around a seemingly simple question has resurfaced: why do we conserve nature? Contention around this issue has come and gone many times, but in the past several years we believe that it has reappeared as an increasingly acrimonious debate between, in essence, those who argue that nature should be protected for its own sake (intr...

Governments around the world are increasingly invoking hydrological services, such as flood mitigation and water purification, as a justification for forest conservation programs in upstream areas. Yet, rigorous empirical evidence that these programs are actually delivering the intended services remains scant. We investigate the effect of deforesta...

Like commercial marketing, social marketing uses the 4 “Ps” and seeks exchange of value between the marketer and consumer. Behaviors such as handwashing, and products such as those for oral rehydration treatment (ORT), can be marketed like commercial products in developing countries. Although social marketing in these areas is growing, there has be...

Improved cook stoves (ICS) have been widely touted for their potential to deliver the triple benefits of improved household health and time savings, reduced deforestation and local environmental degradation, and reduced emissions of black carbon, a significant short-term contributor to global climate change. Yet diffusion of ICS technologies among...

Environmental health problems such as malaria, respiratory infections, diarrhoea and malnutrition pose very high burdens on the poor rural people in much of the tropics. Recent research on key interventions-the adoption and use of relatively cheap and effective environmental health technologies-has focused primarily on the influence of demand-side...

Because emissions from solid fuel burning in traditional stoves affect global climate change, the regional environment, and household health, there is a real fascination with improved cook stoves (ICS). Surprisingly little is known about what households like about these energy products. This paper reports on preferences for ICS attributes in a samp...