Reducing Fuel Poverty for Sustainable Future Development

Abstract

Fuel poverty refers to the condition of having too little money to be able to keep someone's home warm (Cambridge Dictionary 2020). The fuel poor are those households who spend a significant portion of their income to sustain a reasonable heating regime. After a series of campaigns against "excess winter deaths" and following scholarly work of Boardman (1991), the UK's policy statement in 2001 declared that households who need to spend more than 10% of their income to achieve satisfactory heating as well as other energy services are fuel poor.

The theoretical peculiarities of energy poverty research: a systematic literature review

“…While the Global South (or developing nations) suffers "energy poverty" as a condition of the lack of access to adequate and enough energy services at home, especially those enabled by the supply of electricity and other "modern" domestic fuels (access-based energy poverty); the Global North (or developed countries) suffers "fuel poverty" as a condition of the inability for effortlessly paying for enough and adequate energy services, especially for thermal comfort services, given that the supply of the energy carriers that allow such services is mostly secured (affordabilitybased energy poverty) see, e.g., Dugoua and Urpelainen [18] and Healy and Clinch [19]. This contrast has been present since the beginning of the field and remains in most recent studies of energy poverty worldwide, e.g., Siddiqui et al [20] and Tarekegne [21]. However, there are more and more case studies in low and middle-income countries that explicitly consider energy affordability and thermal comfort issues as well, see, e.g., Mazzone [22], Urquiza-Gómez et al [10] and Zhang et al [23].…”