Energy enables the people to meet their most fundamental needs, including the ability to cook, light and heat a home, complete everyday tasks as well as for children’s education, community healthcare, and increasingly, work, as many people continue to work from their homes following the COVID-19 pandemic.
As we share this portrait, household energy bills have soared in the UK in the backdrop of a global energy crisis, as fossil fuel shortages have led to large-scale uncertainty, with the UK still heavily dependent on fossil fuels for its energy consumption.
“This Energy Price Guarantee (UK Government, 2022) is a guarantee for fossil fuel companies, but also a massive gamble for current and future taxpayers more broadly. By not investing strategically in effective deep retrofit and neighbourhood resilience, we are gambling with our own prospects for a brighter future and perhaps equally critical, our ability to address the cascading impact of the energy crisis that are part of a wider polycrisis in the midst of climate breakdown.”
—CIVIC SQUARE and Dark Matter Labs, The Great British Energy Swindle
This portrait is also being released as the British government outlines a range of policies that exacerbate the impacts already felt by many working class communities across the country. Not only will households in middle and low income groups see adverse impacts, but small and independent businesses are also seeing a “cost of doing business crisis” as the energy prices of running their organisations becomes increasingly unaffordable. (Valero, 2022).
The systemic factors relating to Energy are, therefore, being felt viscerally as direct impacts in even more of our everyday lives than will previously have been true, making this dimension a difficult but pertinent example of the opportunities and challenges to be faced, as we orientate towards ecological safety and social justice.
You can also explore how Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) introduce the Energy dimension of the Local Social lens on slide 17 of the Doughnut Unrolled: Dimensions of the Four Lenses tool.
Birmingham City Council's Health and Wellbeing Strategy (2022) identifies the city target to:
“Reduce the number of households in fuel poverty to the national average by 2030.” (Birmingham City Council, 2022)
We have adopted this as our city target for the energy dimension.