PhD ceremony Yang Wang: Supply-chain perspectives on energy inequality and sustainability transitions in the global economy
Achieving sustainable development requires simultaneously improving human well-being, reducing poverty, expanding access to modern energy, and mitigating climate change. These challenges are closely interconnected through global supply chains, which redistribute energy use, material extraction, and employment across regions.
This thesis adopts a global supply-chain perspective, integrating multi-regional input-output analysis with household expenditure, energy, material, and socio-economic data to examine the distributional dimensions of sustainable development and just transitions. The results reveal large global household energy inequality. The richest 1% of the global population accounts for 14% of household energy footprints, while indirect energy embodied in supply chains dominates the footprints of affluent households.
The thesis further shows that eradicating multidimensional poverty requires considerably less additional energy than generalized income-based poverty alleviation while meeting basic human needs. Achieving universal electricity access increases the global electricity sector's material footprint by 17.2%, with a further 6.9% increase under low-carbon electricity pathways, shifting extraction-related environmental burdens toward developing regions.