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Abstract Indoor air pollution from burning solid fuels for cooking is a major environmental health problem in developing countries, predominantly affecting children and women. Traditional household energy practices also contribute to substantial time loss and drudgery among households. While effective interventions exist, levels of investment to date have been very low, in part due to lack of evidence on economic viability. Between 2004 and 2007, different combinations of interventions – improved stoves, smoke hoods and a switch to liquefied petroleum gas – were implemented in poor communities in Nepal, Sudan and Kenya. The impacts were extensively evaluated and provided the basis for a household-level cost-benefit analysis, which essentially followed the methodology proposed by the World Health Organization. The results suggest that interventions are justified on economic grounds with estimated internal rates of return of 19%, 429% and 62% in Nepal, Kenya and Sudan, respectively. Time savings constituted by far the most important benefit followed by fuel cost savings; direct health improvements were a small component of the overall benefit. This paper describes the methodology applied, discusses the findings and highlights the methodological challenges that arise when a global approach is applied to a local programme.

As the world confronts the Covid-19 pandemic, we hope that all of you are doing well. We know that many lives have been greatly disrupted, and that world economic activity is slowing and maybe declining in some places. We have read reports that energy consumption has been greatly affected by the slowdown in world economic activity—likely contributing to the sharp plunge in oil prices earlier this year. We do not know how long this pandemic may last. As we look forward to the end of the pandemic and a recovering world economy, however, we wonder if and how energy systems may have to be transformed, and whether new energy policy needs and approaches will emerge. Will we see any change in the trajectory of adopting sustainable energy systems and reducing carbon emissions? In the academic world, many of us are now teleworking and teaching our courses online. This transition has proved time consuming—so we want to thank our many reviewers who are staying on or close to schedule. So far, Energy Policy has been mostly unaffected by the pandemic, but we must recognize that the Elsevier employees who are responsible for the operations side of the journal may at some time be affected by Covid-19. In the meantime, we want to keep you informed about some recent developments regarding Energy Policy, including a little about its history and our editorial priorities.

This paper's objective is to apply Intervention Mapping, a planning process for the systematic development of theory- and evidence-based health promotion interventions, to the development of interventions to promote energy conservation behavior. Intervention Mapping (IM) consists of six steps: needs assessment, program objectives, methods and applications, program development, planning for program implementation, and planning for program evaluation. Examples from the energy conservation field are provided to illustrate the activities associated with these steps. It is concluded that applying IM in the energy conservation field may help the development of effective behavior change interventions, and thus develop a domain specific knowledge-base for effective intervention design.

Traditional cooking is today's largest global environmental health risk. Over 640 million people in Africa are expected to rely on biomass for cooking by 2040. In Kenya, cooking inefficiently with ...

Despite the rapid growth of road transport, emissions of lead have fallen dramatically in recent decades, so much so that experts suggest airborne lead is no longer a health risk in developed economics. To test this proposition, recent epidemiological evidence on dose-response functions is merged with economic valuation techniques to derive an economic cost for lead emissions in the UK. While premature mortality effects are modest, it is concluded that the overall economic cost is still significant.

Croatia as an Annex I country of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and a country that has pledged in the Annex B of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce its GHG emissions by 5% will have to envisage a new energy strategy. Compared to the energy consumption collapse in some transitional countries, Croatia has passed through a relatively short-term reduction of GHG emissions since 1990 because of higher energy efficiency of its pretransition economy. It is expected that in case of baseline scenario, it will breach the Kyoto target in 2003. Several scenarios of power generation are compared from the point of view of GHG emissions. The cost-effective scenario expects a mixture of coal and gas fired power plants to be built to satisfy the new demand and to replace the old power plants that are being decommissioned. More Kyoto friendly scenario envisages forcing the compliance with the Protocol with measures only in power generation sector by the construction of mainly zero emission generating capacity in the future, while decommissioning the old plants as planned, and is compared to the others from the GHG emissions point of view. The conclusion is that by measures tackling only power generation, it will not be possible to keep GHG emission under the Kyoto target level. The case of including the emissions from Croatian owned power plants in former Yugoslavia is also discussed.

Abstract To improve the air quality in winter, clean heating policy was implemented in “2 + 26” cities of China in 2016, which mainly included replacing coal with gas or electricity. Tremendous financial subsidies have been provided by city and central governments. This new heating mode changed the heating fee-cost to residents. This paper estimates the economic costs to both governments and residents, and evaluates the environmental and public health benefits by combining a difference-in-differences model with an exposure-response function. Results show that the total costs of clean heating were up to 43.1 billion yuan. Governments and residents account for 44% and 56% of the total costs, respectively. In terms of benefits, the clean heating project is effective for air pollution control and brings health economic benefits of about 109.85 billion yuan (95% CI: 22.40–159.83). The clean heating policy was identified as a net-positive benefit program with environmental and public health improvements. However, the inequality in subsidies from different cities governments increases the heating burden on low-income households and leads to heating poverty for households in the less developed regions. We provide suggestions for implementation in future clean heating campaigns and in subsidy mechanism design in China and for other developing countries.

We review the existing evidence on interventions for energy poverty and health with a novel and distinctive focus on how interventions work to produce health outcomes. There is a substantial literature on the impacts of interventions for energy poverty on health, most of which is concerned with substantial energy renovations, and focused on measuring health outcomes. Here we offer a distinctive analysis of this material: using a combination of realist review and process evaluation we use the evidence to articulate the ways in which interventions work. We focus on substantial energy renovations for health, given most of the existing evidence refers to these. Our analysis allows us to identify the logic of intervention design, showing how the practicalities of implementation are shaped by causal assumptions, as well as documenting how participants respond to these interventions. The analysis reveals gaps between intervention design and participant response, which suggest that interventions must work closely with participants to ensure success. Policy recommendations include: energy poverty interventions should take account of how people will respond to technical change, fund support for households to adapt to new technology, offer opportunities for inclusive design processes, and be flexible in delivery.