Chuma Ebere (p), Erkinai Derkenbaeva, Sol Maria Halleck Vega, Eveline van Leeuwen, Bardia Mashhoodi

Gustavo Moreira

Grid congestion and energy poverty pose significant challenges to Dutch municipalities, limiting access to affordable, sustainable energy and hindering local energy transition efforts. While national policies aim to accelerate decarbonization, they often fail to align with municipal energy needs and socio-economic realities, leaving vulnerable groups overlooked. This study investigates these gaps by conducting in-depth interviews with municipal decision-makers, identifying their challenges, priorities, and opportunities in navigating the energy transition.
Our findings reveal disparities in local governance approaches, highlighting both successful interventions and policy misalignments that contribute to inequities in the transition. We assess the effectiveness of current business models for energy transition, emphasizing the need for win-win strategies that balance economic, social, and environmental goals. By comparing municipal responses, we identify key success factors and propose optimized business models tailored to local conditions, ensuring more equitable and efficient energy transitions at the municipal level.
This study contributes to the literature by bridging the gap between top-down energy policies and local realities, offering scalable, municipality-driven solutions to address grid congestion, energy poverty, and sustainable energy integration.

Gustavo Moreira (p), Maria Eduarda Antoniolli

Lilia Karpinska

Fear of crime is a multidimensional phenomenon that extends beyond actual crime rates, affecting individuals’ well-being, mobility, and trust in public institutions. In Brazil, despite its significance, the perception of safety remains underexplored in empirical research. Understanding the factors shaping this perception is essential for designing effective policies that go beyond crime prevention to improve overall security and quality of life.

Perceptions of safety are influenced by personal experiences, neighborhood conditions, and institutional trust. Studies show that women, the elderly, ethnic minorities, and economically disadvantaged populations tend to experience higher levels of fear due to heightened vulnerability. Urban and rural areas face distinct challenges: while urban settings struggle with high crime rates, rural communities often experience insecurity due to geographic isolation, limited police presence, and inadequate security policies.

A key factor influencing safety perceptions, particularly at night, is the quality of public lighting. According to the Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) framework, well-designed urban spaces can deter crime and enhance feelings of security. Public lighting improves visibility, strengthens informal social control, and fosters greater community engagement. CPTED is based on principles such as natural surveillance, territorial reinforcement, access control, and maintenance and image, all of which contribute to safer public spaces.

This study explores the impact of public lighting on individuals’ perception of safety. Its specific objectives are: i) To analyze whether public lighting affects the perception of safety among individuals in urban and rural areas in Brazil. ii) To investigate how individual characteristics—such as gender and race—combined with lighting quality influence safety perceptions.

Empirical evidence suggests that improved public lighting reduces criminal opportunities, enhances surveillance, and increases public confidence. While some studies debate its direct effect on crime reduction, most findings support its role in lowering fear and encouraging public space usage. This research utilizes secondary data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE, 2021) and applies probit models to estimate the impact of public lighting on perceived safety.

The findings will contribute to urban planning and security policies by reinforcing the role of environmental design in shaping safety perceptions. Addressing disparities in lighting infrastructure can foster safer, more inclusive environments, particularly for vulnerable populations. This research highlights the need for integrated strategies combining urban design, public policy, and social initiatives to promote safer communities in both urban and rural settings.

Lilia Karpinska (p), Sławomir Śmiech

Sol Maria Halleck Vega

The recent energy crisis and the preceding COVID-19 pandemic impose danger on the well-being of the most vulnerable groups, causing the spread of energy poverty across Europe. This study examines the level and dynamics of energy poverty in 2019, 2021, and 2022, focusing on macro-regions (NUTS1) in 23 European countries. The data is aggregated from the EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions conducted with households in all EU countries. Following the Mazziotta-Pareto approach, we put forward a new comprehensive measure of energy poverty comprising several non-substitutable indicators with the possibility of conducting intertemporal comparisons. Latent hierarchical models are built to assess the variability within and between countries. Our results indicate that 2019-2022, European regions faced diverse levels and dynamics of energy poverty within countries. Bulgaria, Lithuania, Greece, and Portugal experienced the most hardship. We note substantial regional variability and opposite dynamics in Romania, Portugal, Italy, and Greece, which calls for a mindful regional cohesion policy. Our analysis reveals considerable regional heterogeneity in energy poverty levels. However, changes in these levels are predominantly driven by national rather than regional factors. This may indicate either the pivotal role of national policies in responding to crises or the absence of regional policies specifically aimed at combating energy poverty. Regional trends are strongly influenced by the broader national context, suggesting that energy-related programmes targeting households were largely implemented nationwide.

Sol Maria Halleck Vega (p)

Chuma Ebere

Energy systems are becoming more decentralized (European Commission, 2019), with large volumes of more locally generated power, which is changing energy geographies. Energy communities have been highlighted for their potential to be key enablers to facilitate a just energy transition (Caramizaru and Uihlein, 2020). First, I will highlight three interrelated opportunities and challenges in relation to energy communities and spatial implications. A particular form of energy injustice is energy poverty (Jenkins et al., 2016), which has become a growing concern in Europe. Despite energy communities’ potential benefits including in helping alleviate energy poverty, they have been treated in relative isolation from each other (Hanke and Guyet, 2021). In my work with Jordan Young, we unravel the specificities of energy communities’ energy poverty alleviation approaches and barriers faced. The Netherlands is selected as a case due to a doubling of energy communities over the past decade. A survey is developed to appraise energy communities’ (lack of) engagement in tackling energy poverty with n=196. Using an ordinal logistic model, the effectiveness of approaches of energy communities in addressing energy poverty is assessed. Insights from this study on implications for energy community movements and other (energy system) actors can also be valuable for other countries facing energy poverty challenges. This work also invites to further explore implications of changing social and space-energy interdependencies.