Overview
While the World Bank is on target to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030, the Earth’s temperature is increasing to irreversible levels causing far-reaching long-term consequences on economic growth and the environment. Concealing the access to energy and its productive use with low carbon, resilient growth trajectories will present inherent tradeoffs.
The Development Impact group’s Energy and Environment program was started with the motivation to build rigorous impact-evaluations for sectors that affect climate change and build programs to mitigate its effects and strengthen resilience. The Energy and Environment program focuses on three overarching questions:
What constrains electricity access and how can we cost-effectively overcome these constraints?
What factors influence the potential impact of electricity and how can complementary interventions affect them?
What are the distributional implications of the renewable energy transition, and how can policy help mitigate these to support a “just” transition?
By addressing these questions, the program works at the intersection of infrastructure expansion and maintenance, government policy, and social responses to energy services and policies.
Themes
Theme 1: Addressing Access Constraints
The Development Impact group's energy program examines barriers to energy access across different tiers of ESMAP's multi-tier framework and seeks to elevate households and businesses up the energy ladder. The Development Impact group’s research emphasizes the challenge of affordability in last-mile connection costs post-grid expansion, with few households connecting, and suggests targeted subsidies are essential but limited by fiscal constraints and weak utility finances. The Development Impact group's interventions in Senegal have shown promising results in increasing demand for high-quality solar products. Additionally, the Development Impact group’s ongoing research explores how access to basic energy services impacts the demand for higher tiers of service in the long run, aiming to drive economic growth.
Theme 2: Translating Access into Impact
Prior research indicates varying impacts of electrification programs across different income settings, with stronger effects observed in middle-income countries compared to lower-income ones. The Development Impact group is conducting impact evaluations in Sub-Saharan Africa to address low electricity consumption in low-income settings by identifying necessary preconditions and complementary interventions for realizing development impacts of expanded energy access amid unreliable grid service. This includes examining factors such as energy reliability, revenue sustainability, and the role of complementary infrastructure and human capital.
Theme 3: Managing the Distributional Implications of the Renewable Energy Transition
The Development Impact group is partnering with the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) through their Accelerating Coal Transition (ACT) program to help quantify the impacts of coal decommissioning in developing countries, and possible interventions that could minimize the negative impacts on marginalized workers and coal-dependent communities.
Partnerships
The research agenda has benefited from direct engagements with the World Bank’s Climate Change Cross-Cutting Solutions Area, Energy and Extractives Global Practice, Environment and Natural Resources Global Practice, Water Global Practice within the World Bank, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Climate Investment Funds (CIF), the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP), and DFID (including the evaluation department and climate-change teams).
