Energy Poverty and Health Vulnerability : A Global Analysis

As a United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), the global community aims to provide clean and affordable energy to all people by 2030. Despite these efforts, energy poverty remains a reality for billions of people in 2022. Reducing energy poverty is a crucial impediment for public health and economic development. Previous research established a link between energy poverty and traditional public health measures such as overall mortality rate, but relatively little is known about its overall impact on public health. Following calls from researchers and policymakers to create more holistic measures of public health, the current research uses panel data from 143 countries between 2000-2016 to analyze the impact of energy poverty on health vulnerability. Using OLS, fixed-effect, system-GMM, and asymmetric analysis, results show that reducing energy poverty also reduces health vulnerability. Energy poverty increases the susceptibility of negative health outcomes (sensitivity) and decreases a population’s ability to respond to public health crises (resilience). The analysis also reveals a heterogeneous impact of energy poverty on health vulnerability depending on the level of development with the greatest impact in more developed and high-income regions. Results and future areas of interest are discussed in terms of their importance for researchers, international organizations, and local governments