Vermont Law School in South Royalton has launched the Energy Security & Justice Project to expand global access to sustainable energy and craft national energy policies that adapt to climate change with­out worsening socioeconomic in­equality.

The project, which is overseen by Associate Professor Benjamin Sova­cool, expands the international law and policy focus of VLS’s Institute for Energy and the Environment.

The project’s researchers investi­gate how to provide ethical access to energy services and minimize the injustice and human impacts of cur­rent energy production and use. The researchers explore how to equita­bly provide available, affordable, reliable, efficient, environmentally benign, proactively governed, and socially acceptable energy services to households and consumers.

One track of the program focuses on lack of access to electricity and reliance on traditional biomass fu­els for cooking in the developing world. Another track analyzes the moral implications of existing en­ergy policies and proposals in the United States.

“Too often, national and interna­tional energy policies have focused on protecting adequate supplies of conventional fuels with little or no regard for the long-term conse­quences to the people and cultures the policies are intended to benefit,” said Sovacool, an internationally recognized energy security expert. “The Energy Security & Justice Project is a rare effort to broaden the scope of energy security re­search and examine the human factors responsible for the ultimate success or failure of these policies.”

The project, in cooperation with the MacArthur Foundation, Rocke­feller Foundation, Asia Research In­stitute, and the National University of Singapore, has published a series of case studies examining energy security in Asia. The case studies include China’s Renewable Energy Development Project, Malaysia’s massive expansion of hydroelectric dams in Sarawak, and Bangladesh’s effort to install two million solar home systems.

In addition, Sovacool’s team has partnered with Morgan Bazilian, special advisor to the Director-Gen­eral of the United Nation’s program on international energy and climate policy, to explore new approaches to energy governance in Energy Policy, the world’s leading journal on energy supply, demand and uti­lization.

“Global energy policymakers are experiencing an ‘a-ha’ moment that questions everything we ever thought about energy security, cli­mate change and adaptation,” said Christopher Cooper, the project’s senior research fellow. “Just as global development policy under­went a radical transformation after efforts that looked good on paper failed in the field, energy policy­makers are reexamining just what it means to be energy secure.”