The Women in Environmental Economics for Development (WinEED) collaboration held their monthly seminar series on October 29 in collaboration with the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative (SETI).
The seminar brought together 24 researchers across the world. Speakers for the seminar were Dr. Ngawang Dendup, assistant professor of political science and economics at Waseda University in Japan and Dipendra Bhattarai, PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania, Australia.
Dr. Dendup presented his research on how an alternative household energy, biogas, affects the intra-household time reallocation and if biogas has any crowding out effect on household poverty and conservation related outcomes. One takeaway from this presentation was that owning a biogas stove might signal that this household is better off and may fare better with early child marriage.
Dipendra Bhattarai presented his research on introducing solar-powered irrigation pumps (SPIPs) for farmers in Nepal and how employing innovative financial models impacts women farmers. He finds that “from a recent Nature article, despite economic growth in South Asia, food and nutrition security has not improved a lot in South. We need to produce more food to accommodate for a growing population, which in turn means we need more feed, which in turn needs more water. However, ground water extraction is a high energy intensive activity.” His study used solar powered pumps and targeted financial incentives to target women farmers to adopt the system.
Check out the seminar video below!
The next seminar will continue on the topic of gender and energy and will be held on November 23, 2020 at 11:00 AM EST (Eastern Standard Time) presented by Camille Belmin. Register here!