Living well within limits –Analysing inequality and international energy footprints

Project Summary
The Living Well Within Limits (LiLi) project is an ambitious interdisciplinary programme, addressing crucial but understudied questions: What are the biophysical resources, more specifically energy, required to achieve human well-being? What influence do social and technical provisioning systems have on the levels of resource use associated with well-being? The LiLi project’s ambitious aim is to construct the conceptual and methodological framework upon which this type of research can be carried forward, and to apply it using both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse and model the energy requirements of well-being. The LiLi project is based on an innovative framework, integrating biophysical resource use, the social and physical provisioning systems which draw up on these resources as inputs, and the social outcomes which depend upon them.

Summary of this PhD project
This PhD project will principally pursue quantitative analysis, focusing on explaining the role of provisioning systems in explaining variations and trends in the “environmental efficiency of well-being”. The project focuses on economic distribution within countries, by using income classes as its unit of measurement. This project builds on much recent interest wealth and income inequality, but extends this type of analysis to quantify the affordability and availability of key provisioning services and well-being outcomes within countries. Applicants should be interested in deriving insights from multiple disciplines (economics, health, sociology) to explain the drivers of inequality in provisioning. Most importantly, the significance of social and physical provision systems in explaining differences in well-being vs. energy use performance will be fully explored, thus enabling priority energy service systems for well-being to be identified.
The PhD research will in all cases be undertaken within a larger collaborative group related to the LiLi project. There will be opportunities to translate the research findings into formal models to test scenarios upon, as well as to participate in community-level case studies of energy use and well-being in several countries. The Faculty of Environment at the University of Leeds encourages PhD dissertations by alternative format, encouraging the publication of PhD research in international peer-reviewed journals.