Reconciling Energy Poverty and Climate Change: Universal Energy Access and Net-Zero Emission

This book highlights innovative solutions that not only combat climate change but also address energy poverty, ensuring a more sustainable and equitable future. It explores common roots, synergies, and trade-offs between energy poverty and climate change. It argues that policies to combat climate change like decarbonization, can negatively impact energy poverty alleviation, whereas policies to reduce energy poverty like increasing energy access, reduction in energy prices, or rise in energy demand, may increase energy-related carbon emission that contributes to climate change.

This book meticulously delves into the challenges of providing clean, reliable, and modern energy access to millions of energy-poor people, without creating any negative impact on the environment. It not only provides a comprehensive review of the intricacies of energy poverty and climate change mitigation but also gives a clear understanding of the policy challenges encountered to address the dual problem. Moreover, given the sustainable development goals of attaining SDG7 by 2030 and SDG13 by 2050, the content is timely and significant. Apart from students, this book will be beneficial to academics, working as development economists or energy economists, government policymakers, media personnel covering the climate crisis, and social activists.

Dr. Anasuya Haldar has been recently awarded a Ph.D. Degree from Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology (NIT) Rourkela, Odisha, India, under the supervision of Prof. Narayan Sethi. She is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Delhi School of Economics (DSE), Delhi University, New Delhi, India.  Her current research interests are Energy Economics and Development Economics.

Dr. Narayan Sethi is a full time Professor of Economics in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology (NIT) Rourkela, Odisha, India. He is currently appointed as the Head of the Department. He started his teaching/research career at NIT Rourkela since July 2009. He did his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Hyderabad in India. His research focus has shifted from purely International Economics to an interface of Energy Economics and Development Economics. This is also reflected in the increase in his number of research articles in the area of Energy and Energy Economics in many high impact-factor journals.