Urbanisation and domestic energy trends: Analysis of household energy consumption patterns in relation to land-use change in peri-urban Accra, Ghana

Abstract

Urban living has become a dominant lifestyle in the 21st century. The period also comes with far-reaching changes in knowledge-gathering, which has become more compartmentalised, fragmented and specialised. This is reflected in the ways of working of both academic and government institutions, and has led to incomplete knowledge and understanding of human ecology, and the formulation of unwise, strongly sectoral policies, not least in respect to the understanding, planning and managing the dynamics of energy use and land-use change in an era of global climate change. This study contributes to addressing the perceived shortcoming by comparing patterns of energy consumption in two research locations in peri-urban Accra: representing a more urbanised, and a cluster of rural communities, respectively. The study applied an inter-disciplinary approach combining expert interviews, a literature review, and an in-depth change analysis based on remote sensing/geo-information systems. The paper establishes a relationship between land-use change and wood-fuel and LPG usage mediated by geographical and socioeconomic discrepancies. We conclude that different peri-urban patterns are driven by geographic, historical, cultural and economic disparities. Therefore, if energy policies and strategies for sustainable development are to be successfully constructed, there is the need to accommodate and enforce land-use policies by adopting a comprehensive approach to governance11This research is funded by African Development Bank (AFDB) and Japan Science and Technology Agency as part of their support to Next Generation of researcher (NGR African) under the Education for Sustainable Development Programme .