The Energy & Environmental Security Program seeks to improve energy and environmental security for the world's poor. There are 2 to 3 billion people worldwide who have little or no access to beneficial energy for cooking, heating, water sanitation, illumination, transportation, or basic mechanical needs. Our projects take practical steps toward solving the energy and environmental deficits of this Other Third. Under the leadership of Professor Lakshman Guruswamy, we offer a synthesis of bottom-up and top-down technical solutions, actions, and policies that demonstrate, for example, how non-carbon based Appropriate Sustainable Energy Technologies (ASETs) can address energy poverty.

The world energy justice conferences of 2009, 2010, and 2012 have brought together leading international and U.S. decision-makers in politics, engineering, public health, law, business, economics, and innovators in the sciences. They have collaboratively explored how best to address the issue of Energy Justice through long-term interdisciplinary action, information sharing, and deployment of appropriate sustainable energy technologies (ASETs).

Our recent projects include our work in Ayaviri, Peru. Now in its third year, this project illustrates the feasibility of addressing both global warming and energy poverty simultaneously through the deployment of improved cookstoves and community development. It demonstrates a replicable, bottom-up approach to improving energy access.

The Partnership for the Relief of Energy Poverty (PREP) seeks to promote collaboration among multiple stakeholders for the commercial design, fabrication, deployment, and use of ASETs through the creation of regional alliances around the world.

For more on our energy and environmental security work, including our Energy Justice Conferences in 2009, 2010, and 2012, please visit The Other Third.