Last month saw the EVALUATE team give presentations at several high profile events across Europe. As reported in a recent blog post, at the first event Dr Neil Simcock gave a talk on ‘Energy transitions and vulnerability: unpacking the gender dimensions of energy poverty in the Global North’, at The 13th Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference. This conference was held 6th-8th June in Tampere, Finland. A week later Neil presented similar work to Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s ‘Housing Retrofit Group’, in Trafford Town Hall, Manchester.
On 13th June, Dr Harriet Thomson gave a keynote presentation at the Interregional Thematic Seminar – ‘New energy culture, citizen involvement and energy poverty’. This event had an international mixed stakeholder audience, including energy agencies and local authority representatives. Harriet’s talk was entitled ‘Health and energy poverty in an EU context’ and presented findings from both the qualitative and quantitative work packages of the EVALUATE project. This included recent work from a new journal article: Health, Well-Being and Energy Poverty in Europe: A Comparative Study of 32 European Countries.
This was followed by an invited presentation on 21st June by Professor Stefan Bouzarovski during a session on ‘Energy Poverty and How to Tackle it’ at the EU’s Sustainable Energy Week. During this presentation, Stefan introduced the new European Energy Poverty Observatory (EPOV) project being led by the University of Manchester.
On the 22nd June, Harriet gave a talk on ‘Landscapes of energy vulnerability in Europe’, at the People, Place and Policy conference held in Sheffield. This presentation started by looking at the theoretical contribution made by Professor Bouzarovski and Dr Saska Petrova in their earlier work on energy vulnerability. Next it looked at the (in)adequacy of existing survey data for measuring energy vulnerability, based on a recent article in the Indoor and Built Environment special issue on fuel poverty: Rethinking the measurement of energy poverty in Europe: a critical analysis of indicators and data. The presentation then looked at findings from Harriet’s earlier PhD work, as well as more recent EVALUATE research, before giving a brief introduction to the EPOV project.
On the same day (22nd June), Stefan gave an invited talk at SHAPE ENERGY’s international summer school, held in Lyon. Stefan’s talk focused on path dependencies in district heating, and the relationship to energy poverty, based on a paper published last year: Locked-in post-socialism: rolling path dependencies in Liberec’s district heating system.
Watch this space for updates on forthcoming sessions at the Royal Geographical Society’s Annual International Conference, to be held at the end of August!
Energy Vulnerability and Urban Transitions 