Energy Transitions and Environmental Change in East and Southern Africa’s Coupled Human, Terrestrial, and Atmospheric Systems.
Summary
The East and Southern Africa region is experiencing unprecedented environmental change, with untold consequences for human well-being and sustainability. Environmental change is catalysed by dynamics in terrestrial and atmospheric systems, which in turn affect regional climate. Impacts are both first and second order. Land cover and land use change (LCLUC) directly affect livelihoods strategies available to households, and changes in air quality affect human health and well-being. Together, LCLUC and changes in air quality affect weather patterns leading to regional climate change. We leverage dynamism in East and Southern Africa’s coupled human, terrestrial and atmospheric systems and its implications for environmental change, including predicting future impacts on regional climate, land use, and air quality. We highlight energy transitions in the region as we hypothesize that biomass use and the associated dynamics of coupled human, terrestrial, and atmospheric systems play a major role in environmental change in the region. Our prosed study has three main scientific challenges. First we seek to understand at relatively fine scale the drivers of change in land use and air quality. Second, we use high quality field data from Malawi to calibrate, validate, and scale regional land use and air quality models to understand past, present and future scenarios of environmental change in the region. Third, we evaluate the potential for a novel scalable household energy intervention to mitigate the predicted impacts of environmental change.