About

Climate change and ecological degradation heighten the vulnerability of low-income countries toward natural hazards. In the effort to minimize the impacts of shocks, the term resilience has gained much attention to address the question “When a group of people experience a shock or stress, how to prevent them from collapsing, or recover but are worse than before, but instead bounce back better?”. The resilience concept for energy by To et al. (2018) includes both the resilience of energy systems to shocks and stresses as well as the contribution of energy to improving community resilience

Build back better
Bounce back from shock means full restoration of energy access post-disaster. It is critical to restore services and reduce disruption in people's daily lives since sub-optimal conditions in energy systems can affect other systems, such as health and education. The impacted community will need to build back better by integrating resilient energy access as an important aspect of disaster risk management. Energy resilience planning needs to be integrated into plans for disaster risk management, this includes decision-making protocol, financing, the common pool resource perspective, the energy security context of a country, and decentralized energy options.

Leave no one behind
Aligned to Sustainable Development Goals #7—Affordable and Clean Energy, all people should have an equal chance to have sustainable energy access which benefits their health and economic development. Designing sustainable energy access for communities should be based on the understanding of their transformational capacity and how they cope with energy needs after a disaster. Energy recovery projects may fail due to inappropriate technology design or long-term financial arrangements for maintenance and repair. Inequalities may also arise between communities during the recovery. Hence, it is imperative for donors, researchers, and governance institutions to be able to address the resilience of energy needs to ensure that no one is left behind in accessing sustainable, affordable, and clean energy.

Through this knowledge hub, RDI has released several related projects and publications to support the realization of community energy resilience. The findings can be leveraged to contribute to compiling information for the development of the underlying framework as a reference for future research, to assist the baseline study of specific locus, or to assist the design of an intervention program. The knowledge dissemination will benefit those with the same mission to identify the opportunities and barriers for cleaner and sustainable energy access and to call for collaboration between researchers, NGOs, humanitarian organizations, donors, informal governance institutions, and government agencies.