Diagnosing spatialized energy poverty traps: Global evidence from nighttime lights

Few research studies have focused on the nature of the relationship between nighttime lights and electricity consumption at subnational levels in South America, a region with heterogeneous geography and urbanization levels and complex socioeconomic dynamics. This study shows that it is possible to estimate, for Bolivia, a wide range of indicators of electricity consumption at the municipality level and two temporal scales using features derived from nighttime lights and other spatial data sources, in combination with readily available municipality characteristics. The prediction errors for annual electricity consumption range between 13% MAPE for average residential consumption and 59% MAPE for average commercial consumption. Similar accuracies are obtained when predicting monthly values. For both annual and monthly electricity consumption, we highlight the variation in estimation accuracy for various municipality subsets and show that prediction can be significantly improved when selecting municipalities based on population size, energy poverty, or levels of sustainable development.

Background: Satellite imagery is increasingly used to measure electrification rates and track progress toward the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. However, its reliability in remote rural areas remains unclear due to sparse populations with far lower electricity consumption than urban areas. Objective: This study examines the detectability of electricity mini-grid installations through changes in nighttime brightness. Methods: We employed a Difference-in-Differences model adapted for staggered treatments on a dataset encompassing over 700 mini-grids built between 2014 and 2023 across 20 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.Results:The findings indicate that mini-grids do not significantly alter the nighttime light signature immediately following installation, suggesting that traditional electricity access mapping techniques may underestimate electrification rates in rural areas. The analysis also uncovers a consistent and temporally varying background signal in VIIRS DNB nightlights that complicates the detection of brightness changes. Finally, two recent remote-sensing-based energy access maps are evaluated at known mini-grid sites: one identifies just 9% as electrified and the other 37%, consistent with our finding that mini-grid electrification is not fully detectable with current nightlight-based approaches.Conclusion:This study highlights the need for improved remote-sensing-based electricity access mapping techniques and, in lieu of that, bias correction for underestimations in rural areas.

Thermodynamics imposes a well-established pyramidal distribution of energy availability across trophic levels, but whether species richness follows the same pattern remains unclear. In this study, we examined species richness across trophic groups for all known terrestrial tetrapod and arthropod species, representing over 90% of Earth’s terrestrial animal diversity. By categorizing species into fundamental trophic levels, we found that 46% are primary consumers (feeding on plants), 43% are higher-level consumers (feeding on primary consumers) and 11% are mixed consumers (generalists). Further analysis of global community trophic structures in mammals and birds uncovered a consistent ratio of species richness across trophic levels, independent of geographical location or total species richness. We propose that this non-pyramidal distribution of diversity arises from higher ecological differentiation among species at higher trophic levels, which may offset their greater extinction risk associated with smaller populations. This process could generate uniform trophic structures if primarily driven by mechanics intrinsic to trophic positions and their interactions rather than specific environmental characteristics. Such intrinsic mechanisms may ultimately influence diversity across trophic levels and the eco-evolutionary dynamics structuring ecological networks.