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Sugganahalli, a rural vernacular community in a warm-humid region in South India, is under transition towards adopting modern construction practices. Vernacular local building elements like rubble walls and mud roofs are given way to burnt brick walls and reinforced cement concrete (RCC)/tin roofs. Over 60% of Indian population is rural, and implications of such transitions on thermal comfort and energy in buildings are crucial to understand. Vernacular architecture evolves adopting local resources in response to the local climate adopting passive solar designs. This paper investigates the effectiveness of passive solar elements on the indoor thermal comfort by adopting modern climate-responsive design strategies. Dynamic simulation models validated by measured data have also been adopted to determine the impact of the transition from vernacular to modern material-configurations. Age-old traditional design considerations were found to concur with modern understanding into bio-climatic response and climate-responsiveness. Modern transitions were found to increase the average indoor temperatures in excess of 7 C. Such transformations tend to shift the indoor conditions to a psychrometric zone that is likely to require active air-conditioning. Also, the surveyed thermal sensation votes were found to lie outside the extended thermal comfort boundary for hot developing countries provided by Givoni in the bio-climatic chart.

In the aftermath of shock events, policy responses tend to be crafted under significant time constraints and high levels of uncertainty. The extent to which individuals comply with different policy designs can further influence how effective the policy responses are and how equitably their impacts are distributed in the population. Tools which allow policymakers to model different crisis trajectories, policy responses, and behavioral scenarios ex ante can provide crucial timely support in the decision-making process. Set in the context of COVID-19 shelter in place policies, in this paper we present the COVID-19 Policy Evaluation (CoPE) tool, which is an agent-based modeling framework that enables researchers and policymakers to anticipate the relative impacts of policy decisions. Specifically, this framework illuminates the extent to which policy design features and behavioral responsiveness influence the efficacy and equity of policy responses to shock events. We show that while an early policy response can be highly effective, the impact of the timing is moderated by other aspects of policy design such as duration and targeting of the policy, as well as societal aspects such as trust and compliance among the population. More importantly, we show that even policies that are more effective overall can have disproportionate impacts on vulnerable populations. By disaggregating the impact of different policy design elements on different population groups, we provide an additional tool for policymakers to use in the design of targeted strategies for disproportionately affected populations.

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The World Health Organization recently articulated a number of challenges faced by health systems due to unreliable access to energy services. Reliable energy availability at rural health facilities is understood to be an enabler of access to quality healthcare, owing to its potential impacts on medical services, health and safety, disease prevention and treatment, staff recruitment and retention, and administration and logistics. However, little is known empirically about the intersections of energy and healthcare, often due to the lack of availability of facility level data. Moreover, the gender implications of energy access (or lack thereof) for women as providers and seekers of primary healthcare have not been investigated. In this study, using a gender lens, we explore the linkages between energy and healthcare in three Francophone countries in the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa: Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Haiti and Senegal. All three countries have faced serious challenges to the provision of quality health services, including infrastructure problems and specifically unreliable access to electricity. We use Demographic Health Survey data from all three countries to present detailed descriptions of the association between (a) the availability and reliability of electricity sources, and (b) availability of health services, equipment and medical personnel at different levels of the respective health systems. We find that the unavailability and unreliability of electricity is associated with lower availability of medical equipment and basic health services, especially among facilities at the primary care level in DRC and Haiti. Our findings highlight the opportunity to create more dependable and sustainable health systems by integrating decentralized clean energy technologies into health infrastructure, which can facilitate providers in female-dominated cadres such as nursing the ability to provide the care they are tasked with.