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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 integrated with information on indoor environmental conditions (IECs) and coupled with advice on energy saving actions. An integrated system of energy meters and IEC sensors was trialled in 19 predominantly social housing properties in the Midlands (England). Households were provided with a tablet computer and feedback was provided via a dedicated ‘Energy Dashboard’ web-based software application (app). The app was designed in collaboration with the social housing provider to display electricity and gas consumption data as well as data on three IECs: relative humidity, carbon dioxide and temperature. This paper draws on the findings from two rounds of semi-structured interviews with participants. All respondents using the app reported that they made use of the IEC data within the sense-making process, finding temperature and humidity to be useful in linking energy consumption, activities and household conditions. Interpretation of IEC data tended to increase with time as understanding increased. However, different users ‘noticed’, ‘interpreted’ and ‘enacted’ information differently as they integrated this with other sources of information, such as feedback from household members and experiential knowledge. The findings suggest that, whilst incorporating greater contextual information, such as IECs, into feedback displays can help users make sense of domestic energy consumption, the outcomes of the sense-making process will be different for different households. Nevertheless, the provision of such information appears to support householders to make decisions about their energy management that they feel appropriate for their household’s wellbeing needs, within the bounds of their agency.

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 within the Stories of Change project. This took stories as a central motif and organising device to refresh public and political conversations about energy and decarbonisation. Our hypothesis was that stories could offer a popular and engaging route into thinking about the past and present of humanity’s lives with energy and a lively way of imagining possible futures. We also wanted to test the degree to which stories could offer a shared intellectual space that might support both interdisciplinary and co-productive working for a core team that includes social science, humanities, media, computing and design researchers as well as creative and community partners. The paper considers some of the practical, methodological and theoretical considerations and reflects on the strengths and limitations of stories as both motif and technique in supporting action on climate change.

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. We examine the inclusion of energy-using necessities within the outcomes of deliberative workshops within members of the public focused on defining a minimum-standard of living in the UK and repeated biannually over a six year period. Our secondary analysis shows that energy uses deemed to be necessities are diverse and plural, enabling access to multiple valued energy services, and that their profile has to some degree shifted from 2008 to 2014. The reasoning involved is multidimensional, ranging across questions of health, social participation, opportunity and practicality. We argue that public deliberations about necessities can be taken as legitimate grounding for defining minimum standards and therefore the scope of ‘doing justice’ in fuel poverty policy. However we set this in tension with how change over time reveals the escalation of norms of energy dependency in a society that on climate justice grounds must radically reduce carbon emissions.

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 focus on establishing the state-of-the-art in knowledge and policy for 5 diverse case studies - Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico - as well as for the wider region. Our article has three specific aims: to establish the range of approaches used to research energy poverty across the region; to examine national and supranational policy obligations; and to lay the framework for new research and policy agendas. In combination, our extensive academic and grey literature reviews, and accompanying scientometric, legal and statistical analyses, confirm that energy poverty is a relatively nascent topic, with only 62 scientific articles on the region published since 1991. From this body of knowledge, we identify key differences in the geographies of energy poverty identified by different metrics, with energy services-based approaches generally indicating higher vulnerability within rural areas, while energy expenditure metrics point towards higher risk in urban areas. We also find a dominance of quantitative approaches that tend to use existing (and often limited) forms of survey data, and a relative absence of detailed qualitative research. As such, we argue there is an urgent need for transformative research and policy activities within Latin America and the Caribbean, in order to support access to clean, reliable, and affordable energy services for all.

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 drought DRR measures can have (unintended) positive or negative impacts on risk of the opposite hazard; and (b) how flood or drought DRR measures can be negatively impacted by the opposite hazard. We focus on dikes and levees, dams, stormwater control and upstream measures, subsurface storage, migration, agricultural practices, and vulnerability and preparedness. We identify key challenges for moving towards a more holistic risk management approach.

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 2007 to 2011. There was also a 10 percent reduction in the number of households using firewood. This paper investigates LPG adoption by households who previously relied on kerosene and firewood from two perspectives: the institutional perspective, and social acceptance. Semi-structured interviews with representatives from central government to local government in addition to members of the public in six regions in Java and Sumatera were conducted. Findings indicate that the central government’s commitment to implement the substitution policy—alongside effective regulatory instruments, financial support and infrastructure—was critical to the success of the policy. Meanwhile, from a household perspective the reasons behind adoption of LPG were favourable prices, as the result of subsidies and incentives; energy market lock-in; social trust and norms; government communication and campaigns; and favourable appliance characteristics and/or kitchen design. However, there were also LPG resisters who maintained the use of firewood rather than adopting LPG. Safety concerns, cooking preferences and habitual practices were identified as the main determinants of LPG resistance. Understanding the reasons underlying cleaner fuel acceptance or resistance is essential for policy makers to determine successful regulatory pathways to improve fuel quality for better quality of life.