Globally, approximately 3 billion people use solid fuels such as firewood, dung, crop residues, and charcoal for their energy needs. In Pakistan, solid fuels are also very popular among rural households. Fuelwood, a major fuel source, is collected from forest commons without any financial cost; however, an enormous private cost is involved, such as labor and time commitment. The private cost structure differs according to forest density, distance, forest access, demographics, and household characteristics.
Cooking with solid fuels is associated with increased asthma risk. Asthma kills almost half a million people per year. Continued ambient air pollution, often caused by biomass fuel use, is a leading contributor to new asthma cases and worsens existing symptoms. Lack of modern energy is generally harmful for a vulnerable population, but women and children face the burden disproportionately. In developing countries, women spend many hours cooking, carrying wood and water, and caring for sick children. They suffer injuries, wounds, cuts, sexual assaults, and exposure to extreme weather. Moreover, extreme weather events and natural disasters can cause long-term disruption to the energy system. Floods affect rural households’ access to grid-based energy forcing unhealthy energy choices such as biomass fuels, resulting in deforestation, desertification, and land degradation. Therefore, exploring the disaster-energy nexus in varying contexts is critical to comprehensively assessing risks and evaluating the developmental trajectories to proposed adaptive mitigation and coping interventions.
The dissertation examines three main research questions using a three-paper approach: (1) how flooding affects households’ monthly energy consumption behaviors, specifying the expenditures into total, clean and solid fuels; (2) how correlated are household attributes and time spent for collecting fuelwood and fodder among all men, women, and children; and (3) to what extent asthma/bronchitis is associated with ownership of cookstoves and the quantity of solid fuels used. I use the 2012 - 2014 Pakistan Rural Household Panel Survey (PPRHS), a representative survey conducted across three major provinces and sixteen districts of Pakistan. I apply various quantitative methods, including panel regression modeling, logit, and negative binomial regression modeling.
The first paper does not report any significant association between flooding and monthly household expenditures. The second paper reveals that for children and females, household size, age of the household head, electricity connection, possession of livestock, and paid non-agricultural work positively correlated with time spent on fuelwood and fodder collection. Similarly, for men, ownership of a house, time spent on domestic activities, and paid non-agricultural work is positively correlated with fuelwood collection time; in contrast, flood and employment showed a negative trend with the collection time. The study refutes the energy ladder hypothesis and indicates that fuelwood remains a popular choice among wealthy and educated households. The third paper finds that families that own a cookstove are almost fifty percent less likely to develop asthma/bronchitis; the results also show a negative correlation between education and asthma/bronchitis among rural families. Surprisingly, results indicate no significant relationship between solid fuel usage, cooking hours, and the household head’s gender.
The dissertation contributes to literature and policy in the following ways: first, it builds a baseline for the energy-disaster nexus and suggests how the limitation of the existing design can provide possibilities for future research, which is crucial for implementing, evaluating, and understanding linkages between two critical sustainable development goals: energy (SDG-7) and climate action (SDG-13). Moreover, it stresses the need for a coordinated energy policy for Pakistan to address the dynamic nature of energy poverty contrary to only supply-side interventions to address the energy issues. The supply-side interventions are crucial for sustainable supply; however, equally important is to introduce alternative demand-side programs to address affordability and socio-economic barriers
