In Zambia, like many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, firewood and charcoal are the most accessible and affordable cooking fuels for most households. Rapid population growth and urbanisation are increasing demands for woodfuels, driving forest degradation, carbon emissions, biodiversity loss and testing the resilience of land-based systems. Current policy aims to decrease woodfuels as the primary cooking fuels (from approx. 84% of households in 2023 to 55% by 2027) and promote cooking alternatives. The cooking transition can support sustainable development in multiple ways, but holistic analysis of the wide-ranging impacts of different strategies is needed. Reflecting alternative dominant narratives in Zambia, this paper presents three scenarios to illustrate the possible evolution of the cooking sector if driven by a different strategic focus – minimising deforestation through banning charcoal (“Prioritise Forests”), supporting livelihoods (“Prioritise Livelihoods”), and delivering clean cooking through large-scale infrastructure and planning approaches (“Prioritise Centralised Delivery”). A systematic impact analysis is undertaken to evaluate each scenario across social, technical, economic and environmental factors. Potential opportunities are identified, including for health, sustainable rural livelihoods and formal employment. However, substantial transition risks are also identified, such as loss of livelihoods in the charcoal supply chain, and the affordability of cooking for poorer households. This impact assessment, along with insights on the uncertainties and challenges associated with the various approaches, provide a way for policy-makers to explore the desirability and feasibility of different approaches, potential trade-offs, and how clean cooking can contribute to Zambia's broader development agenda.

Climate compatible development aims to align climate change mitigation and adaptation with social and economic development. Successful climate compatible development must be socially inclusive, and resilient to external shocks. Zambia is a country at the frontline of climate change, with multiple development challenges, and ambitions to pursue a climate compatible development pathway. Scenarios are tools with a long history of application in strategic planning, and may be suitable tools to help countries explore climate compatible development. Therefore, we developed a novel participatory, mixed-method scenario process, to explore pathways of resilient and inclusive climate compatible development for Zambia. We took a stakeholder-led participatory approach, and combined qualitative scenario development techniques with quantitative energy system modelling. We compared a scenario characterised by centralised governance and infrastructure, large-scale export-led industries and continued urbanisation, with one characterised by greater decentralisation of governance, investment decisions and economic development strategies, which maintains the viability of rural livelihoods and slows the urbanisation trend. The scenarios provide a framework for considering opportunities and risks in planning for climate compatible development, and suggest that Zambian decision-makers should: test infrastructure investments and long-term economic plans for both climate and economic resilience; pursue mutually beneficial, equitable development partnerships with like-minded international partners; and appropriately allocate responsibility to different scales of governance and ensure coordination between them. The issues highlighted by the scenarios are of relevance to other countries facing similar challenges. The paper demonstrates that a participatory, mixed-method scenario approach provides a useful framework to explore climate compatible development.

Developing nations encounter significant challenges in accessing the necessary finance to meet climate goals. The emerging ‘Data-to-Deal’ approach is a collaborative effort by 60 specialists, which aims to address this by providing a flexible framework of options, tailored to individual country circumstances, aiming to enhance core functions and capabilities; it serves as a basis for concrete action, informing capacity building, technical assistance, and research. This paper argues for the mainstreaming of a holistic approach to accessing climate finance by outlining the components of the Data-to- Deal pipeline and showing the effectiveness of Data-to-Deal through the demonstration of its successful implementation in Costa Rica.

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Aligning development and climate goals means Africa’s energy systems will be based on clean energy technologies in the long term, but pathways to get there are uncertain and variable across countries. Although current debates about natural gas and renewables in Africa are heated, they largely ignore the substantial context specificity of the starting points, development objectives and uncertainties of each African country’s energy system trajectory. Here we—an interdisciplinary and majority African group of authors—highlight that each country faces a distinct solution space and set of uncertainties for using renewables or fossil fuels to meet its development objectives. For example, Ethiopia is headed for an accelerated green-growth pathway, but Mozambique is at a crossroads of natural gas expansion with implicit large-scale technological, economic, financial and social risks and uncertainties. We provide geopolitical, policy, finance and research recommendations to create firm country-specific evidence to identify adequate energy system pathways for development and to enable their implementation.

Delivering just energy transitions in sub-Saharan Africa requires careful planning and consideration of diverse objectives. Recently in Energy Research and Social Science, Baker et al. provide a useful method for eliciting stakeholder preferences in Ghana; however, they do not take the next step and show how this evidence may be integrated into quantitative energy models.

This study uses an integrated approach to analyse the impacts of climate change on Zambia’s electricity supply and general economy, considering two global climate policy scenarios: Unconstrained emissions (UCE), without effective policies to limit emissions of greenhouse gases; and Level 1 stabilisation (L1S) where aggressive emission reduction policies are implemented. These impacts are captured through three channels: agriculture, roads and energy. The analysis focuses on the projected outcomes for the period between 2045 and 2050. To effectively capture the economy-wide impacts, a dynamic computable general equilibrium model is used. The study concludes that real output growth is adversely affected by climate change under both scenarios. While growth is negatively impacted by all the channels, the roads channel introduces the most uncertainty, because of the importance of roads (and generally infrastructure) in Zambia’s economy. The analysis suggests that climate change in the absence of mitigation policies would reduce Zambia’s GDP by about 6% by 2045-50, while under the L1S scenario the impact could at worst be 4% for the same period. These average results show that Zambia’s real annual GDP growth rate would decline between 0.02 and 0.04 percentage points because of climate change. More favourable outcomes of the L1S scenario notwithstanding, the trade balance under L1S scenario increases more than under the UCE scenario. At the sectoral level, electricity and agriculture are the most affected. Unlike the roads channel, the impact of shocks that came through the energy channel were minimised and contained by increasing electricity imports. Without these, the impacts of the energy channel would even be worse than the roads channel. This brings to the fore two policy issues: the need to invest in climate-resilient electricity-generating technologies, and the importance of clear electricity trade policy.

This thesis studies the challenge of balancing between economic growth and social development that many developing countries are facing. The study sought to understand the impacts that these goals have on each other and how these impacts could be minimised. It looked at how clean energy access is modelled in developing countries and also how growth in Zambia’s mining sector would be impacted by meeting the government’s clean energy access targets in the residential sector. On one hand, increasing access to clean energy would lead to increase in energy demand, which would, in turn, imply increased capital investment in the energy supply system. This augmented investment means increase in energy prices which in turn would limit the growth of the mining sector (the backbone of the economy). Limited growth implicitly means reduced funding for clean energy projects. Thus, in order to adequately capture these complex interactions, three bottom-up models were developed: energy demand, energy supply and mining models. The energy models sought to understand how energy demand would evolve by 2050 and how much capital investment would be required to meet this demand. The mining model focused on understanding how developments in the energy sector would impact strategic investment decisions in the mining sector. It was found that approaches used to study how households transition from one energy fuel to another in developing countries had significant conceptual errors. However, these errors could be minimised by using a bottom-up approach. Furthermore, it was found that while profit margins would reduce as a result of increase in energy prices, the impact of these prices on the firm’s production output was negligible - except if a firm is a marginal mine operation. The output was not impacted because mining firms make decisions based on thresholds and not marginal decrease in profits. Thus, even though reliable energy supply is critical in mining operations, the influence of energy price in investment decision making in Zambia’s mining sector is limited. The key decision variables in the sector were found to be copper price, grade and type of ore.

The Zambezi River Basin in southern Africa is relatively undeveloped from both a hydropower and irrigated agriculture perspective, despite the existence of the large Kariba and Cahora Bassa dams. Accelerating economic growth increases the potential for competition for water between hydropower and irrigated agriculture, and climate change will add additional stresses to this system. The objective of this study was to assess the vulnerability of major existing and planned new hydropower plants to changes in climate and upstream irrigation demand. Our results show that Kariba is highly vulnerable to a drying climate, potentially reducing average electricity generation by 12 %. Furthermore, the expansion of Kariba generating capacity is unlikely to deliver the expected increases in production even under a favourable climate. The planned Batoka Gorge plant may also not be able to reach the anticipated production levels from the original feasibility study. Cahora Bassa's expansion is viable under a wetting climate, but its potential is less likely to be realised under a drying climate. The planned Mphanda Nkuwa plant can reach expected production levels under both climates if hydropower is given water allocation priority, but not if irrigation is prioritised, which is likely. For both Cahora Bassa and Mphanda Nkuwa, prioritising irrigation demand over hydropower could severely compromise these plants' output. Therefore, while climate change is the most important overall driver of variation in hydropower potential, increased irrigation demand will also have a major negative impact on downstream plants in Mozambique. This implies that climate change and upstream development must be explicitly incorporated into both project and system expansion planning.

The study presents long-term electricity supply and demand scenarios for the twelve countries in the Southern African Power Pool, based on detailed bottom-up demand analysis for all countries and a set of internally consistent development scenarios. Total regional electricity demand and supply increase by eight to fourteen times from 2010 to 2070, with major shifts in both the sectoral composition of demand and the geography of demand, with South Africa becoming a much smaller share. On the supply side, the fuel mix shifts from coal and toward hydro in the medium term, but towards other renewables, such as solar, in the longer term, particularly in the scenarios with the fastest decline in capital costs for renewables. This leads to declining unit carbon dioxide emissions in the more aggressive scenarios, even though total power sector emissions still increase. The unit cost of generation for the entire region is stable across all scenarios. The potential transformation of the supply sector would require a fundamental shift in resource use, grid management and infrastructure development in the region, as well as greater regional integration. This also implies significant institutional capacity development in the SAPP Coordination Centre or similar structures for cooperative management of resources.

This paper aims at understanding how Zambia's electricity system would be affected by droughts (due to a dry year) and how the system's adaptive capacity could be improved. Hydropower currently supplies 99% of the total electricity in Zambia, and concerns have been raised because many climate change studies project increased occurrences of dry years in the Southern Africa region. Different economic and climatic scenarios were explored to understand their impact on the development of Zambia's power generation system, and what policies and strategies could be adopted to mitigate these impacts on security of supply and average generation costs, which directly affect the electricity price. The results show that a dry year has significant impact on the average generating cost since hydropower continues to dominate the system. Diversifying the system does not improve the adaptive capacity of the system but only increases the average cost of generating electricity in an average year. The most cost effective way of increasing the system's adaptive capacity is by importing electricity and gradually increasing share of renewable and coal technologies in the system. Further research on how electricity trade in Southern Africa could be enhanced, should be done.