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Projects
The Contentious Political Economy of Biofuels
Kate Neville
In coastal east Africa, Liu Scholar Kate Neville navigates the complexity of the political economy of biofuels through visiting organizations and local communities.
India: Can solar power become a tool for pro-poor development?
Milind Kandlikar
Recepients of the Martha Piper Research fund, associate professor Milind Kandlikar and Sumeet Gulati want to find out if solar power can be a viable energy solution for the 100 million households in rural india who do not have access to electricity.
Effectiveness of Global Environment Facility Funding of Rural Energy Projects
Hisham Zerriffi
This study uses project documents from the Global Environment Facility to determine carbon mitigation costs of rural energy projects and whether funding for incremental costs were covered by additional GEFfunds.
Publications
Coal, wood burning kills more people than malaria
Burning coal, wood or charcoal for cooking kills two million people worldwide, each year — more than malaria — thanks to severe respiratory diseases this causes through indoor pollution, warns an expert. Energy poverty, which is about limited access to clean sources of energy, is practically driving half the global population to rely on such smoke producing sources of fuel, probably the biggest source of indoor pollution, says Hisham Zerriffi, an assistant professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at UBC. “Energy poverty is one of the biggest human welfare issues of our day,” he says. The work was presented on Friday at the 2012 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver.
February 17, 2012
Health and climate benefits of cookstove replacement options
Milind Kandlikar, Andrew P. Grieshop
The health and climate impacts of available household cooking options in developing countries vary sharply. Here, we analyze and compare these impacts (health; climate) and the potential co-benefits from the use of fuel and stove combinations. Our results indicate that health and climate impacts span 2 orders of magnitude among the technologies considered. Indoor air pollution is heavily impacted by combustion performance and ventilation; climate impacts are influenced by combustion performance and fuel properties including biomass renewability. Emission components not included in current carbon trading schemes, such as black carbon particles and carbon monoxide, can contribute a large proportion of the total climate impact. Multiple ‘improved’ stove options analyzed in this paper yield roughly equivalent climate benefits but have different impacts on indoor air pollution. Improvements to biomass stoves can improve indoor air quality, which nonetheless remains significantly higher than for stoves that use liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons. LPG- and kerosene-fueled stoves have unrivaled air quality benefits and their climate impacts are also lower than all but the cleanest stoves using renewable biomass.
November 24, 2011
Household cooking fuels and technologies in developing economies
Hisham Zerriffi
A major energy challenge of the 21st century is the health and welfare of 2.7 billion people worldwide, who currently rely on burning biomass in traditional household cooking systems. This Special Issue on Clean Cooking Fuels and Technologies in Developing Economies builds upon an IAEE workshop on this subject, held in Istanbul in 2008 (Foell et al., 2008). It includes several papers from that workshop plus papers commissioned afterwards. The major themes of that workshop and this Special Issue are: • Analytical and decision frameworks for analysis and policy development for clean cooking fuels. • Making energy provisioning a central component of development strategies. • Strategies/business models of suppliers of modern fuels and technologies. • Analysis of successes/failures of past policies and programs to improve access to clean cooking. This introductory paper serves as a preamble to the 11 papers in this Special Issue. It provides a brief background on household cooking fuels and technologies, including: (1) their implications for sustainable development, health and welfare, gender impacts, and environment/climate issues; (2) options and scenarios for improved household cooling systems; and (3) discussions of institutions, programs and markets. It closes with “Research and Action Agendas”, initially developed during the 2008 workshop.
November 24, 2011
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Events
Mar
1
2012
New perspectives on China’s Energy Security
March 01, 2012
Part of a thematic series titled “China in Global Perspective: The Energy - Sustainability Nexus.” Presented by Dr. Claude Comtois, and hosted in partnership with the Institute of Asian Research, CarbonTalks, and the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.
Feb
22
2012
Putting Environment into the Canada-China Energy Equation: Diagnosis and Prescription
February 22, 2012
Part of a thematic series titled “China in Global Perspective: The Energy - Sustainability Nexus.” Presented by Jiang Wenran, and hosted in partnership with the Institute of Asian Research, CarbonTalks, and the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.
Mar
21
2011
State Science and its Discontents
March 21, 2011
What India's debate on transgenic crops tells us about the relationship between Science and Democracy
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