Nature: “Support Communities That Will Lose Out in the Energy Transition”
An op-ed by Nature’s editorial board references a new initiative by RFF, Columbia University, and the Bezos Earth Fund to support research on fossil fuel-dependent communities.
But as such programmes are rolled out, there’s an increasing need to assess whether they are achieving the desired objective of bringing about an equitable transition to clean energy. The US-based Resilient Energy Economies (REE) initiative is one project trying to do just that. With a modest sum of almost $2 million in seed money from the Bezos Earth Fund, it is seeking to better understand the economic risks and opportunities for fossil-fuel-dependent communities. Projects already funded include evaluations of recent federal programmes intended to help at-risk communities; efforts to understand the risks and opportunities of decarbonization for members of Indigenous American communities who have worked in the oil and gas industries; and schemes to assess the impact of closure or threatened closure of fossil-fuel power plants on various communities. The REE is also looking to fund new proposals. It is US-focused, but this type of research is in fact needed globally.
