Universal access to modern energy services, in terms of access to electricity and to modern cooking facilities, has been recognized as a fundamental challenge for development. Despite strong praise for action and the deployment of large-scale electrification programs and improved cookstove (ICS) distribution campaigns, few studies have shed light on the barriers to, the enablers of and the impacts of access to energy on development outcomes, using rigorous methodologies. This paper reviews this recent strand of research, trying to fill these gaps. The authors focus on the demand-side and household perspective. Their main outcomes of interest are electricity connection and ICS adoption for the analysis of barriers, time allocation, labor market outcomes and welfare for the impact analysis. They provide evidence of significant wellbeing impacts of electrification and mixed evidence for cookstoves.

In representing urban sprawl, the decline in population and employment density from the city centre to the periphery has been identified as the main character associated with the spatial expansion of built-up areas. Urban spatial discontinuity, which occurs when the urban fabric includes built-up or green areas and a relevant share of vacant spaces, has gained recent attention. In this paper, we use Global Human Settlement Layer data to track urbanisation dynamics in European Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) from 1990 to 2014. We represent urban sprawl as the spatial expansion of FUAs associated with either or both declining population density and increasing built-up area discontinuity. We also consider the association with the demographic trends that have been described as the primary driver of urban spatial expansion. We use configural frequency analysis to explore the local association between the different characters of sprawl. We found evidence that urban sprawl effectively took differentiated forms across European FUAs. Even though FUAs have generally become less dense and more disperse, our results show that the extent of these phenomena appears to be more contained in recent years than in previous decades. Both elements of sprawl characterise FUAs with a shrinking population, confirming the decoupling of urban development policies and demographic trends in cities. The results call for better controlled urban development, favouring compact cities and subjecting land-use changes to a perspective of urban population growth.

We present a tractable methodology to estimate climate change costs at a 1 × 1 km grid resolution. Climate change costs are obtained as projected gross domestic product (GDP) changes, under different global shared socio-economic pathway–representative concentration pathway (SSP-RCP) scenarios, from a regional (multiple European NUTS levels) version of the Intertemporal Computable Equilibrium System (ICES) model. Local costs are obtained by downscaling projected GDP according to urbanized area estimated by a grid-level model that accounts for fixed effects, such as population and location, and spatially clustered random effects at multiple hierarchical administrative levels. We produce a grid-level dataset of climate change economic impacts under different scenarios that can be used to compare the cost – in terms of GDP loss – of no adaptation and the benefits of investing in local adaptation.

The relationship between institutional fragmentation and the spatial extent of cities in Europe’s functional urban areas is examined. European Union planning regulations vary across member states, but in most cases local authorities determine land use within the more general regulatory frameworks set by national or subnational authorities. More decentralized and fragmented settings may favour urban sprawl, allowing developers to avoid land-use restrictions in one municipality by moving to adjacent ones and providing incentives for municipalities to adopt less strict land-conversion regulations to attract households and workers. The empirical results fully support this hypothesis and unveil significant differences between small and large cities, the effect of governance fragmentation being a substantial factor in the latter case.