Special Issue: The uneven and increasingly complex dynamics of decarbonisation and energy poverty in the context of unprecedented energy and climate crises

Abstract

Energy as headline news The relationship between climate change, decarbonisation and energy poverty is particularly topical. When we organised our international conference 'Making Decarbonisation Fair' in March 2021, the event from which this Special Issue emerged, we aimed to build upon a body of research that, whilst simmering for decades, had rightly become increasingly mainstream. Since then, we have been plunged into an energy crisis of a severity not seen in over half a decade owing in no small part to the geopolitics unleashed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Gatto, 2022). The interplay between this deep international energy price crisis and the increasingly manifest impacts of climate change (Clarke et al., 2022; King and Henley, 2022) mean that energy and all its intricate economic, social and political corollaries, is frontpage news. Price pressure in wholesale gas markets has meant spiralling energy prices, and although the exact extent of the price crisis-and Government responses-has varied between countries, households are almost universally facing energy bills that would have been unimaginable even a year ago (Foucart, 2022; Kalkuhl et al., 2022). In the UK, for instance, there has been a doubling of household energy bills in only a year, triggering a 50 per cent increase in fuel poverty (NEA, 2022). A direct outcome of this is additional financial stress for those managing household energy bills and inevitable rises in the number of households experiencing energy poverty and the attendant impacts it brings for health, wellbeing and social and economic inclusion. These current challenges also highlight the interconnected nature of energy, transport, and food, both in the ways they compete within household budgets (Simcock, 2020) and in the extent to which these energy-intensive sectors are vulnerable to fluctuations in energy markets. Whilst current global events have turned attention away from decarbonisation and towards energy security, this is happening at a time when the impacts of climate change are increasingly evident in the form of heatwaves, flooding, wildfires and drought. There is now little