Overview

The renewable energy revolution has swept across much of the world over the last decade, attracting hundreds of billion dollars of new investment per year, dominating global climate finance and transforming the energy landscape.  Yet roughly 800 million people in the world are still without access to electricity, 90% of whom live in fragile states. Only a tiny fraction of renewable energy investment is directed to these countries. There are many factors that explain this mismatch, most of which relate to the fact that renewable energy investment decisions are based on a combination of business case considerations (would this be a sound investment?), environmental impact (how much carbon would be displaced or avoided?), and renewable energy generation (how much new capacity would come online?). There is no commonly agreed framework for understanding and measuring the social impacts of renewable energy. As a result, investment flows to stable countries with conducive regulatory environments, seeking the projects with the highest economic returns and greatest environmental impacts. We require a new toolkit to measure the other social impacts of renewable energy if we are to combat energy poverty, and harness the potential of renewable energy as a tool for building resilience, peace, and stability.

EPP’s Theory of Change

EPP believes renewable energy can serve as a building block for long term sustainable peace and resilience. Our theory of change operationalizes the inputs provided by EPP and the short, medium and long term impacts our work contributes to, culminating in the eight pillar framework known as Positive Peace, developed by the Institute for Economics and Peace.

EPP’s Impact work

Project level impact tracking

EPP has built out an impact management system (IMS) to allow us to track and measure the peace benefits of P-REC funded projects. Based on our Theory of Change, and utilizing standardized indicators from the relevant SDGs, the IMS can track and measure the outputs, outcomes and peace impacts to which P-REC funded projects have contributed.

Research

EPP is committed to continuously learning and understanding what and how renewable energy and energy projects can serve as a tool in the peace-building toolkit and what the implications of a renewable energy transition may be for fragile and climate-vulnerable states. As part of our impact work, we are undertaking in-house research into various areas at the nexus of the peace-building/renewable energy spaces.

• Literature Review: Energy Access, Renewable Energy and Social Impact.
  As part of EPP's ongoing research into the renewable energy and peace nexus, we have begun compiling a literature review on the state of knowledge on this topic, with a particular focus on peace evaluative frameworks. We plan to continually update this document as we learn more and as our work deepens, so this should be taken as a 'living document'. For now it presents our best understandings of what we know and how we know it in terms of the socio-economic and environmental impacts of renewable energy.

• Renewable energy and peace: Empirical analysis of global data. This white paper uses an original data set covering 156 countries over the period from 2009 to 2019 to empirically test the relationship between energy access, renewable energy consumption and production, and peace, using panel data regression. Key findings include: There is a positive and statistically significant correlation between access to electricity and peace (both negative peace and positive peace); and that higher levels of electricity access (renewable or non-renewable) decreases future levels of conflict in countries that face the triple threat of fragile, climate vulnerable and energy poor.

Please feel free to contact us if you have further resources we have missed and believe would be a valuable addition to this growing body of work.