Hello, and welcome to SHINE!
I’m Sam Williamson, an Associate Professor in Equitable Energy Systems at the University of Bristol, and I am very fortunate to lead SHINE.
SHINE – Sustainable, Holistic, Inclusive Energy Systems for Well-being – is a 3-year project funded by UK Research and Innovation, through the Ayrton Fund programme from the UK Government. We are a collaboration of transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners from The Gambia, Ghana, Brazil, Nepal, South Africa and the UK.
In this first Insight, I wanted to give a little background about how and why the project came about and what our hopes are for the outcomes of SHINE.
Energy is a backbone of our modern life. In the Global North, we often don’t even realise we’re using it. However, as we all know by now, energy can be linked to 73% of all greenhouse gas emissions. So, the way we consume energy has to change. Not only that, but the consumption of energy is unfair, with 80% of those having no access to electricity and about 50% with no access to clean cooking living in sub-Saharan Africa.
From a theoretical background, we are inspired by the work done linking energy access and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):
- Connecting the sustainable development goals by their energy inter-linkages (IOPScience)
- Mapping synergies and trade-offs between energy and the Sustainable Development Goals (Nature.com)
Energy access strongly reinforces all the SDGs, with only a few constraining challenges. However, energy systems are not normally designed explicitly to try and support these targets. Instead, they are often designed with more linear targets in mind, such as the number of households connected to a system. So, could we try to change this?
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): energy access strongly reinforces all the SDGs, with only a few constraining challenges.
How energy access reinforces and constrains the achievement of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, taken from McCollum et al.
This was where the spark of our idea came from. We realised two things. Firstly, our project wouldn’t be about doing large scale interventions. It would be about developing a framework to try and achieve these SDGs . And secondly, we would need a concept to try and link all of them together.
In conversation with colleagues from the MRC Unit in The Gambia, we started to discuss the idea of well-being and how it related to our aims and objectives. The definition which the WHO uses states:
Well-being is a positive state experienced by individuals and societies. Similar to health, it is a resource for daily life and is determined by social, economic and environmental conditions.
Further, the Geneva Charter for Well-being, states that well-being is about:
- Valuing and nurturing planet earth and its ecosystems;
- Equitable economies for human development within planetary boundaries;
- Developing healthy public policy for the common good;
For our team , these well-being principles really encompassed the opportunity to bring together the SDGs. They also demonstrated that well‑being clearly focuses on inclusion, equity and climate. And so, we thought this would be a highly appropriate structure to understand modern energy access.
And so, SHINE was born.
The project will be developing energy access interventions in The Gambia and Ghana. But, these will not be the main impact of the project. These interventions will feed into an energy system design framework built around well-being, which will aim to build more inclusive, equitable and sustainable energy systems. This is our main aim.
We have a massive international team of incredible people, across four continents, five time zones and a multitude of disciplines. We’ll be co-producing research with amazingly passionate communities. We’re going to have moments of both fantastic success and abject failure. It’s going to be exciting, scary, fraught, and joyful.
And I can’t wait!