My name is Lærke Damsø, I am from Denmark and I am studying International Development Studies at Roskilde University in Denmark, and I will be blogging here at the RVE.SOL website for the next months.

I contacted Vivian with the purpose of using the RVE Hub KUDURA as a case in my bachelor project about the link between renewable energy, sustainable development and poverty reduction. The main goal of my project is to investigate to what extent a renewable energy project like the RVE Hub can be a triple-win solution to the triple-crisis – a term used by UNDP amongst others.

I encountered RVE.SOL during my attendance at the United Nations conference Rio+20 in June in Rio de Janeiro. One of the themes of the conference was “Green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication”, which I chose to focus on, due to the fact that it expresses a promise for a triple-win solution in the future. The theme states that we have to eradicate poverty to make the world sustainable, and that this should be done with a growth that is environmentally sustainable. There are some interesting links here that should be pointed out: First of all, is it possible to have an environmentally sustainable growth? Secondly, if not, can we then eradicate poverty without economic growth? And finally, what is the interlinked relationship between poverty and the environment?

One thing that seemed almost universally agreed upon at Rio+20, was that renewable energy can be a triple-win solution to the triple-crisis, due to the “poverty-energy-climate nexus”. This nexus expresses how renewable energy can eradicate poverty through lower prices and at the same time be sustainable. It will in this way also reduce the pollution of poverty, and in the long run reduce the impact of the environmental changes for the poorest of the poor – following the UNDP Human Development Report 2007-08, 262 million people were affected by natural disasters between 2000-04, where 98% of them were living in developing countries.

The first analysis of my project will be about the social, economic and environmental impact of the RVE Hub on the population in Sidonge, and on the possibility for scaling-up a project like this to a broader level to reach more people. My second analysis will be used to discuss different theories of the role of growth as part of the new sustainable development – can it be sustainable, or is it even necessary for developing a country?

I will during my blogs try to keep you updated on my findings and research for my project, and more thoroughly write about some of the themes from above regarding the poverty-energy-climate nexus, the triple-win solutions, the sustainability for all, and maybe also the role of organic agriculture in the future.