Research project
Fair Rural Energy Futures: Towards equitable energy demand reduction in rural England
- Start date: 1 October 2025
- End date: 30 September 2028
- Value: £72,000.00
- Partners and collaborators: Involve, CPRE (The Countryside Charity), ClimateGuide
- Primary investigator: Dr Alice Garvey
Rural areas face unique challenges and opportunities in reducing energy demand and are often overlooked by national decarbonisation policy and funding. This project is exploring insights from the lived experience of rural citizens to assess how to fairly decarbonise rural areas of England, in combination with quantitative spatial analysis and policy evaluation.
This work aims to provide place-sensitive, actionable insights to address energy demand across a diverse range of rural areas. Existing secondary data from the Our Energy Futures Citizens’ Panel (convened by the Energy Demand Research Centre) will be analysed, as well as collecting new primary data through a new workshop with a subset of the panel members.
Through these research activities we aim to generate a panel-inspired vision of positive low energy futures for rural areas of England. There is also wide recognition that the urban-rural binary can be reductive.
The project will use quantitative spatial analysis to explore how to go beyond this framing to more accurately reflect capabilities to decarbonise within diverse rural area types.
The project will finally use a workshop to consider policy perspectives on how energy demand reduction policies can be tailored to rural communities.