Risky energy geographies: From energy transition to disaster risk reduction

Abstract

An energy transition is needed to mitigate climate change, but the shift to renewables is also a broader opportunity to reduce disaster risk. This article integrates perspectives from energy geographies and critical disaster studies to examine how energy transition intersects with disaster risk reduction. Unpacking the energy-disasters interface, ‘energy’ is conceptualised in two ways: first, as a hazard produced socio-naturally in energy hazardscapes; and second, as a requirement for people to achieve essential capabilities in the face of hazards. Scholarship on energy vulnerability and energy justice provides concepts for achieving more equitable disaster preparedness, recovery, and risk reduction.

Keywords

energy geographies energy transition energy justice disaster risk reduction hazardscape vulnerability

Introduction

In September 2017, Hurricane María tore through Puerto Rico, destroying 80% of its electricity system. As the powerlines collapsed, so too did the many infrastructures that depended on them: refrigerators and air conditioners, water pumps and communication networks, ventilators and dialysis machines all fell silent. The blackout lasted 11 months, exposing stark social inequalities in energy access and wellbeing (de Onís, 2021; Smith-Nonini, 2020). The disaster illustrates how energy occupies a paradoxical position in modern society: it is indispensable for sustaining human life and at once capable of abruptly putting it in danger. Despite this dual role, the place of energy systems in disaster risk reduction has received little attention from energy geographers and critical disaster scholars. The field of energy geographies has notably developed over the past decade, coalescing around questions of carbon lock-in and energy transition in the context of climate change (Baka and Vaishnava, 2020; Bouzarovski et al., 2017a; Bridge et al., 2013, 2018; Calvert, 2016; Castán Broto and Baker, 2018; Haarstad and Wanvik, 2017; Huber, 2015; Ptak et al., 2025; Solomon and Calvert, 2017; Tornel, 2023). Yet, as van Bommel et al. (2024: 1; also Lammers et al., 2020; Sharma, 2019) point out, the link between energy transition and disaster risk reduction has been ‘considered only very scarcely by scholars and policymakers’.

While energy transition is necessary for reducing carbon emissions, it also offers an opportunity for improving disaster preparedness and reducing vulnerability in a world of intensifying climate hazards. Realising this potential, however, requires a double understanding of energy, both as a metabolic requirement (Bridge et al., 2018; Cederlöf, 2024; Shove and Walker, 2014) and as a latent hazard embedded in infrastructures. Today, we are witnessing record investments in renewable energy and low-carbon electrification (IEA, 2025) with the aim of eliminating risks associated with the carbon economy. But these investments also generate new, socially differentiated risks to create what Sovacool (2025: 95) calls a ‘low-carbon risk society’. In the following, I argue that because energy metabolises every dimension of social life, the uneven geographies of energy systems condition who can prepare for, withstand, and recover from disasters. At the same time, energy infrastructures themselves frequently become sources of hazard within socially uneven energy landscapes. An energy transition enacted within a society that produces vulnerability and hazards may therefore perpetuate, rather than resolve, the disaster risks it seeks to address (Lohmann, 2024; López-Gómez, 2025).

I first approach energy infrastructure as potential hazard, introducing the concept of energy hazardscapes (Huber, 2019; Mustafa, 2005). This concept moves beyond technical approaches to risk reduction (Nightingale et al., 2020; Pelling, 2011), integrating the physical, political economic, and cultural dimensions of energy and climate hazards in one framework. Second, I examine energy as a metabolic requirement in disaster contexts, working through sets of literature that explore how energy systems shape people’s vulnerability within hazardscapes. The first point of attention is the intersection of energy vulnerability (Bouzarovski et al., 2017b; Day et al., 2016) and disaster preparedness (Tiwari et al., 2022; van Bommel et al., 2024); the second, how disaster recovery raises questions of energy justice (Kaufmann et al., 2024; Underwood et al., 2020); and the third, how the goal of energy transition may be integrated with calls for disaster reduction (Pelling et al., 2022; Popke and Harrison, 2018). The latter agendas can be mutually reinforcing, but given energy’s role as both necessity and hazard, they are likely to generate new vulnerabilities and power asymmetries (Huber et al., 2017; Lohmann, 2024). If an energy transition is to succeed in curbing emissions and reducing disaster risk in the same instant, these are tensions that require careful attention.

Theorising energy hazardscapes

The most intuitive way to conceptualise the energy-disasters relationship may be to think of energy infrastructure as a hazard. This perspective aligns with a broader hazards paradigm in disaster research (Gaillard and Mercer, 2013) and leads into the realm of energy accidents, such as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (Brown, 2019; Schmid, 2011). Here, through a mix of human mismanagement and technological failure, hazardous infrastructure enters contexts of social and ecological vulnerability. Sovacool et al. (2015) find that between 1874 and 2014 the most lethal energy accidents were those involving hydroelectric and fossil-fuel infrastructure, while the most expensive involved nuclear power plants. Such accidents are also how geographers have tended to think about the energy-disasters interface. For example, Bridge et al. (2018) analyse the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout to demonstrate how the human communities suffering the most from this disaster were already socially and economically disadvantaged. In a thermodynamic sense (Cederlöf, 2021), many hazards are events in which large amounts of energy are released in a short period of time, rapidly increasing entropy (Gill and Malamud, 2014). This is true for hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires but also for manufactured energy infrastructures. While energy’s materialities are unruly and evade determinist explanation (Bakker and Bridge, 2006; Barry, 2013), a large hydroelectric dam or an operational oil platform is more likely to become a hazard than a solar panel or a wind turbine, taking into account the potential energy stored within the infrastructural system.

Although energy accidents are important to study on their own, they do not fully capture the complexity of the relationship between energy infrastructure and climate hazards. In the context of floods, storms, and wildfires, energy infrastructure is best conceptualised through the lens of cascading or compound hazards (Cutter, 2018; Pescaroli and Alexander, 2016; Yao et al., 2016). These interactions unfold in two primary ways. First, an energy system can be a hazard that triggers a secondary, environmental hazard. For example, this occurs when transmission lines arc and set vegetation ablaze, starting a wildfire (Ptak et al., 2024). Second, energy infrastructures are themselves vulnerable to environmental hazards, becoming hazards of their own when exposed to these. The 2011 Fukushima disaster exemplifies this dynamic, where an undersea earthquake triggered a tsunami, which resulted in grid failure and inoperative backup generators, ultimately leading to the meltdown of three nuclear reactors from overheating. In response to such interactions, energy and disaster studies have largely focused on technical solutions. In The Electricity Journal, which centres on electric power policy, recent studies build on longer-term conversations about infrastructural hardening, drainage improvements, and early-warning systems (Panteli and Mancarella, 2015; Schaeffer et al., 2012) to highlight the need for utilities to plan for the impacts of climate hazards (Ashrafi and Parhizkar, 2023; Chattopadhyay and Panteli, 2022).

Technical solutions can be important for addressing immediate hazards, but critical disaster scholars have long argued that they fail to address the root causes of disaster risk. By leaving processes that generate vulnerability untouched, technofixes even help perpetuate the status quo (López-Gómez, 2025; Nightingale et al., 2020; O’Brien, 2012). Geographers have instead developed the concept of hazardscapes to move beyond a focus on technofixes. This concept rejects Cartesian framings of hazards as purely ‘natural’ or ‘technological’, suggesting that hazards are produced in lived environments with material, political economic, and cultural dimensions. In a key study, Mustafa (2005) demonstrates how hazards are in part socially constructed: in Pakistan, flood managers intervened in an urban landscape based on a narrow technocratic vision of risk. Flood victims, in contrast, perceived a much broader range of choice, but social structures and discourses circumscribed them from acting on these. In comparison, Collins (2009) draws closer attention to the political economic dimensions of hazardscapes. He shows how wealthy US residents gained privileged access to the benefits of living in a flood-prone area, while workers in the service economy had to live there for a lack of options. Floods, then, became hazards in relation to the political economic processes and the cultural practices that co-produced them.

The hazardscape concept offers a framework for approaching energy infrastructure as socio-natural hazard. Notably, hydroelectric dams store vast amounts of potential energy that can become dangerous under certain conditions; however, the production of dam hazard is often foreseeable, and in some cases disaster is even permitted to happen, when capital-driven development outweighs the concerns of local communities (Huber et al., 2017). In the Himalayas, hydro-climatic and geological hazards have received little attention in dam planning. Huber (2019) argues that this lack of attention is no accident but an integral part of a Himalayan hydropower hazardscape. Narratives of energy sovereignty and energy nationalism (Lord, 2018) are sustained by what Huber calls ‘strategic ignorance’ on the part of decision-makers who repeatedly disregard the production of hazard to facilitate capital’s search for profit. As a cultural practice, strategic ignorance plays an ideological role, obscuring unevenly shared risks in the region. Gergan (2020; see also Vaishnava and Baka, 2022) similarly demonstrates how a notion of ‘geological surprises’ is used within the dominant technocratic ideology of Himalayan hydropower development. Geological surprises are officially deemed unforeseeable, ‘even with the best of geological investigations’, in the words of the Government of India (quoted in Gergan, 2020: 7). Policymakers thus invoke expert knowledge to translate the unruliness of Himalayan geology into risk assessments that systematically benefit dam contractors and utilities. Hazard is actively produced through ideological and institutional practices that prioritise profit and national ambition over the vulnerability of local communities.

Hydropower hazardscapes can be understood as one member of a more general set of energy hazardscapes – landscapes shaped by various energy infrastructures and their associated risks. The hazardscape concept can be further integrated into the energy geographies literature via existing work on energy landscapes (Bridge et al., 2013; Calvert, 2016; Castán Broto, 2019; Haarstad and Wanvik, 2017; Harlan and Baka, 2024; Tornel, 2023; Zimmerer, 2011). As Tornel (2023: 56) argues, energy landscape is a concept that reveals how energy systems are ‘contested through attachment to place’. It denotes both a way of seeing and a humanly transformed environment, one encompassing the spatial distribution of resources and infrastructures, as well as the cultural meanings, power relations, and governance structures that shape how energy is produced, accessed, and used. In their work on oil, Haarstad and Wanvik (2017:433) develop the notion of ‘carbonscapes’ to define ‘the spaces created by material expressions of carbon-based energy systems and the institutional and cultural practices attached to them’. A carbonscape is emergent and unstable, they argue, always subject to change. It is not a far step, then, to integrate hazards as moments of heightened volatility in such a concept, as moments not external but integral to the carbonscape.

The offshore oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico offers a compelling case of how the carbon- and hazardscape concepts intersect. In the early 2010s, the Gulf of Mexico hosted more than 3000 operational oil and gas platforms. From Texas to Mississippi, over 50,000 km of pipeline connected these platforms to terminals, refineries, storage plants, and shipyards. At the same time, this extractive conurbation was located in one of the world’s most hurricane-prone regions. In 2005 alone, hurricanes destroyed 113 platforms off the US south coast and damaged a further 160 due to wave inundation and mooring failure (Cruz and Kraussmann, 2013: 46). The risk of disaster unfolding in this carbonscape extended beyond the likelihood of hurricanes destroying oil and gas infrastructure – although such an event could itself be catastrophic for oil workers, investors, and the marine environment. In a study of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Watts (2012) concludes that not only was infrastructure at risk, but through the repeated substitution of socio-ecological for financial risk in the oil industry, the possibility of disaster increased as hydro-climatic and energy-based hazards could cascade through the extractive landscape.

An important aspect of a hazardscape is that the meaning of hazard – and what counts as one – is not universal but emerges in cultural context. Anglo-American experiences, like Deepwater Horizon, are strongly overrepresented in social-science energy research (Baka and Vaishnava, 2020; Bridge, 2018; Cederlöf, 2023), which obscures the diverse epistemologies in which hazards are understood globally (see also Tornel, 2023). The designation of something as ‘hazard’ depends on how people make sense of themselves, wider society, and their relationship to the environment (Bankoff, 2003; Cederlöf, 2025; Curley, 2023; Krüger et al., 2015; Walshe et al., 2022). To illustrate, Datta et al. (2022) show how the impact of pipeline leaks in the Saskatchewan River had a holistic meaning for First Nation Elders and knowledge-keepers, amounting to a genocide on medicinal plants and spirit animals. Though the leaks polluted a water reservoir in a way that possibly could be mitigated, they had irreversible consequences for the possibilities of future human and nonhuman generations to thrive. Grasping the implications of a pipeline leak within this energy hazardscape requires cultural contextualisation beyond the Western norm. The energy hazardscape concept offers a lens to unsettle dominant Western notions of hazard and to highlight epistemic conflicts surrounding energy infrastructure, disaster, and justice (Maldonado-Torres, 2019; Ruwanpura et al., 2025; Tornel, 2023).

Indigenous communities often have a distinct ontological understanding of energy hazardscapes compared to energy contractors, utilities, and risk managers (see Cepek, 2012; Gergan, 2020 for further examples). Although these worldviews may be incommensurable, we should refrain from presenting such differences as a simple contrast of essentialised, lived realities. Instead, what often emerges is a process of translation between indigenous lifeworlds and technocentric approaches to risk management (Behn and Bakker, 2019; see also Burman, 2017; Wilson and Inkster, 2018). This was clearly the case during the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfires in Alberta, Canada, when First Nation communities mobilised to save territories occupied by the oil industry. As Wanvik (2020) argues, the indigenous firefighters’ efforts to protect ancestral lands ultimately helped save the oil industry itself; yet the experience of firefighting also opened a space for First Nations to renegotiate their relationship with settler-colonial institutions and the oil industry. The calamitous wildfires turned into a moment of transformation (Pelling, 2011) in which divergent perceptions of hazard intersected with political agency.

To summarise, approaching energy infrastructure as socio-natural hazard requires two analytical shifts. First, we need to move beyond technocentric, physicalist narratives that treat energy as a ‘natural’ phenomenon separate from society. Second, we need to proceed methodologically from the physical through the political economic and the cultural dimensions of energy infrastructure to appreciate how it comes into being as hazard. The latter move often involves recognising that energy infrastructures can deepen dependencies on experts and disempower local communities, marginalising ontologically different ways of knowing hazard and distributing risk unevenly (Lohmann, 2024; Tornel, 2023). It is not surprising that hydropower and fossil-fuel infrastructures dominate the existing literature given the frequency and deadly outcomes of the disasters in which they are involved (Sovacool et al., 2015). However, more systematic study is still needed in an area that remains poorly understood: how does a low-carbon energy transition give rise to novel hazardscapes? What interests, ideologies, and knowledges have produced energy hazardscapes of the past? And what are the political, economic, and cultural implications of post-carbon hazardscapes in which fossil infrastructures are being dismantled amid intensifying climate hazards?

Disaster preparedness and energy vulnerability

A second way of approaching the energy-disasters interface is to locate energy in another part of the hazardscape. This is not as a direct source of hazard but as a determinant of vulnerability. While energy infrastructure can become hazardous – often through a rapid increase of entropy – energy is at the same time a precondition for human and social life, be it for lighting, cooking, heating, cooling, transport, healthcare, education, communication, government, manufacturing, leisure, and more (Bridge et al., 2018; Shove and Walker, 2014; Sovacool et al., 2014). The ability to prepare for disaster varies, therefore, with socially unequal patterns of energy access and energy vulnerability. In a key passage in At Risk, Wisner et al. (2004: 11) argue that vulnerability defines ‘the characteristics of a person or a group and their situation that influence their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard’. Bridge et al. (2018: 124) underscore that the term ‘energy vulnerability’ originates from such work on disasters, where a focus on vulnerability helped transcend the physicalist narratives in which hazards alone determined disaster outcomes (Hewitt, 1983; White, 1945; Wisner et al., 2004). Making the same move, the energy vulnerability concept turns attention away from technocentric perspectives on energy use to foreground the deprivations, harms, and other social impacts that arise from unequal energy access and energy-system change (Bouzarovski et al., 2017b; Day and Walker, 2013; Middlemiss and Gillard, 2015; Petrova and Simcock, 2021).

To understand disaster risk as an issue of energy vulnerability is to ask what energy services people require to satisfy their everyday needs before, during, and after a hazard event. It is a basic yet important observation that energy demand arises not because people find a use for energy as such but for the services or use-values it provides within a lived environment. In Europe, studies of energy vulnerability have focused on the affordability of heating as a barrier to thermal comfort and good health (Bouzarovski et al., 2017b; Middlemiss and Gillard, 2015), while in African and Asian contexts, research has concentrated on cooking and lighting and how the adverse health effects of indoor biomass combustion can be avoided through access to cleaner fuels (Li et al., 2014; Masera et al., 2000). In all these cases, it is the ability to heat your home, to cook, and to see in the dark that is the valued practical outcome, not the ability to maintain a particular technical solution. By framing disaster risk through the lens of energy vulnerability, the key focus becomes how access to essential energy services can be ensured in times of crisis.

For Day et al. (2016), this focus is best anchored in a capabilities approach in the tradition of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. A capability is a person’s opportunity and freedom to be and do things that are considered meaningful (Sen, 1999), and as social practices are always metabolised by energy flows that extend beyond them in time and space (Cederlöf, 2024; Opperman and Walker, 2019), energy is a constituent part of achieving culturally valued capabilities. In a recent study, Tiwari et al. (2022) account for the direct and indirect electricity services implied in central capabilities of health, integrity, and social interaction. Building on Nussbaum’s (2013) much debated enumeration of essential capabilities, they argue that climate resilience should be defined as the ability to sustain affordable, reliable, and safe access to the electricity services underpinning these capabilities after an adverse event. Sharma (2019) argues similarly that a focus on energy service provision can both enhance short-term resilience and support long-term development. In a context of disaster risk, then, energy vulnerability is best conceptualised as the political economic relations that determine a person’s or a group’s ability to sustain the energy services they need to achieve capabilities before, during, and after the impact of a hazard.

From this point of view, there is no inherent reason to prioritise a specific infrastructural solution to be ‘hardened’ for disaster preparedness. For example, it is easy to assume that thermal comfort (or even bodily survival) in hot climates requires some kind of indoor cooling, as heat stress is increasingly putting people’s health at risk – and differentially so in terms of class, race, gender, etc. (Anwar, 2023; Sim and Parsons, 2025).¹ As Day et al. (2016: 261) argue, however, the concept of energy services draws attention away from technologies like air conditioning and makes ‘conceptual space to possibilities to support health and thermal comfort by other means, for example, adjusting the design of dwellings, adjusting clothing codes, heating or cooling public and community spaces, etc.’ Instead of looking for novel technical solutions by default, disaster risk scholars should begin by asking how and why people secure the delivery of energy services in the first place, and then examine the social relations that prevent them from achieving valued capabilities through other pathways, including with a lower carbon footprint.

One common strategy for preparedness is fuel stacking, which is the practice of stockpiling energy options that can deliver an energy service. Fuel stacking occurs across both urban and rural settings and in low- as well as high-income countries, but it has predominantly been discussed in a development context. Several studies demonstrate that when a new fuel or technology is introduced in households, vulnerable people tend to accumulate energy options rather than transition linearly from one to another – an observation that challenges the notion of ascending the ‘energy ladder’ (van der Kroon et al., 2013). The accumulation of energy options serves to hedge for price rises, to accommodate technical differences, and to fulfil a variety of culturally specific purposes (Masera et al., 2000; Yadav et al., 2021).² Rather than resisting innovation, fuel stacking reflects how energy-vulnerable households navigate the risks associated with living in unequal hazardscapes and underscores the importance of inclusion in energy decision-making.

For the purpose of disaster risk reduction, fuel stacking can be understood in two complementary ways. On the one hand, it is a response to energy vulnerability and serves as a strategy to reduce the impact of disruption by creating redundancy. On the other, the ability to accumulate energy options always occurs in a context of existing energy vulnerability, where it is shaped by socio-economic inequalities and cultural perceptions. In the Sundarbans of West Bengal, India, for example, van Bommel et al. (2024) argue that photovoltaics (PV) is an effective fuel-stacking option that reduces risk in places where grid connections already exist. The inhabitants of Bally Island invested in solar PV systems until a grid connection was made and the Government of West Bengal began subsidising costs. This left many households unable to invest in additional energy options, including PV, to ensure the delivery of key energy services. Ultimately, this increased their vulnerability to climate hazards. In comparison, Cederlöf (2023) demonstrates how the Cuban government distributed electricity generation to make the national grid more robust following the 2004 Hurricane Charley. At the same time, it made households more reliant on electricity for key energy services by handing out electric cooking appliances and restricting the trade of LPG and kerosene. As a precaution, households were given a spare gas cylinder for use in case of emergency, but this state-mandated arrangement left households more vulnerable to hurricane hazard for a lack of storable cooking-fuel options.

The practice of fuel stacking highlights some of the pathways through which energy services can be delivered, just as it reflects entrenched patterns of energy vulnerability. As such, it offers a lens for understanding disaster preparedness: there is little doubt that people’s ability to secure key energy services in uneven energy landscapes shapes disaster outcomes. To integrate a focus on energy vulnerability in research on disaster preparedness, therefore, we need to ask how valued capabilities can be sustained in relation to the inequalities and cultural practices that shape energy service provision. In doing so, we must examine the broader political economic and cultural contexts within which energy systems are embedded. The case studies from India and Cuba above illustrate the central role of governments and regulatory institutions in shaping equitable access to energy services, especially when these institutions exclude communities in energy-system governance (Becker and Naumann, 2017; Szulechi, 2018). As disasters unfold, the role of regulators becomes even more pronounced, raising the stakes of inclusive and participatory governance.

Disaster recovery and recuperative energy justice

The failure to deliver essential energy services during a disaster quickly turns energy infrastructure into a hazard: disruptions in energy systems cascade into other critical infrastructures, which cease to work (Barquet et al., 2024; Pescaroli and Alexander, 2016). In 2021, Winter Storm Uri hit the United States and Mexico, leading gas wells and gathering lines to freeze and electricity grid components to malfunction. The gas and electricity infrastructures were closely integrated. In Texas, utilities used natural gas to generate almost 50% of all electricity; the gas infrastructure in turn relied on electricity to operate. To prevent a complete grid shutdown, requiring what is known as a difficult ‘black start’, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) ordered load shedding. 9.9 million households lost power, causing indoor temperatures to drop. The blackouts further cascaded into the Texan water infrastructure in which pumping stations stopped working, frozen water pipes burst, and treatment plants were unable to purify water without electricity. Households were left without access to clean water (Glazer et al., 2021). The interrupted energy metabolism meant that key energy services were unavailable, magnifying the human consequences of the freeze.

While the ability to prepare for disaster is in part a product of a person’s energy vulnerability, disadvantaged groups are more likely to experience the harmful effects of energy disruption than those on the opposite side of unequal relations of age, caste, class, ethnicity, gender, health, etc. Chen et al. (2022) find that neighbourhoods with a high share of minority-group residents were four times more likely to lose electricity access during Winter Storm Uri. Low-income households also relied on more dangerous backup solutions to supply essential energy services. 11 people died and 1400 sought emergency care from the use of unconventional heating sources, such as open gas ovens, with Asian, Black, and Hispanic people suffering 72% of all carbon-monoxide poisoning cases. Busby et al. (2021) argue that these effects on a household scale were compounded by the governance structure of Texas’ electrical industry. Managing most of the state’s deregulated electricity market, ERCOT did not require power plants to perform routine maintenance, including work to harden them against extreme weather events. Furthermore, because of deregulation, a surge in electricity demand during a period of limited supply led to soaring prices, making the actually available electricity unaffordable for poor households.

The unequal social relations that generate energy vulnerability are frequently reinforced in the aftermath of disaster. Indeed, it is not unusual for recovery efforts to perpetuate the unevenness of pre-disaster energy landscapes. To give a different example, rural communities were disproportionately left in the dark following the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. Underwood et al. (2020) find that the state-owned grid operator had access to disaster-relief funds from international donors, which allowed it to restore the electricity service at a faster rate than energy cooperatives and off-grid producers. During Winter Storm Uri, Kaufmann et al. (2024) demonstrate how the recovery efforts played out along racialised social lines. Several utilities allocated more available electricity to counties with a high proportion of residents identifying as White, augmenting the consequences for those already marginalised. For Kaufmann et al., this inequity can be explained by the short timeframes available for decision-making. Seeing that the Texas grid was within less than 5 minutes of a complete collapse, it was difficult for utilities to ensure just representation and respect due process.

Clearly, socially unequal patterns of disaster recovery raise normative questions of energy justice. While recuperation during Winter Storm Uri highlighted racialised inequities, Underwood et al. (2020) argue that the uneven allocation of resources in Nepal amounted to a case of recuperative energy injustice, with ‘justice’ loosely defined as a matter of ‘fairness’ (p. 2; see Mitchell, 2024 for a critique). Over the past decade, scholarship on energy justice has developed fast, and key studies distinguish between issues of distributional, procedural, representational, and restorative justice (Heffron and McCauley, 2017; Jenkins et al., 2016, 2021; Sovacool and Dworkin, 2015; Tornel, 2023). The energy justice concept opens new ways of thinking about disaster outcomes, just as disasters require us to approach energy justice in a different light. Energy justice research tends to focus on ‘normal’ operations in energy systems or operations during energy transitions. Disaster recovery instead assumes that a hazard has overturned the normal state of affairs and that normative questions emerge when a severed connection is restored or not (Lin et al., 2022). Disasters, therefore, highlight energy justice concerns around the political economic and cultural priorities that govern the restoration of energy services in a situation of heightened vulnerability.³

In Puerto Rico after Hurricane María, citizen groups called for energy justice in the face of racially patterned recovery efforts. Among the communities who struggled to achieve essential capabilities during the 11-month blackout, the number of excess deaths reached the thousands (Cruz-Cano and Mead, 2019). The political economy in which recovery took place greatly shaped the recuperative energy injustices. In the years leading up to the disaster, the state-owned utility Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) had resorted to borrowing and debt-financing to cover its operating costs. It was an easy strategy to pursue since the US Congress had made Puerto Rican bonds triple tax exempt, inviting hedge funds to invest in PREPA with future consumer payments as security. PREPA spent most of its cash on fuel imports, as Puerto Rico – like most other Caribbean island-states – is structurally reliant on oil imports for its energy needs (Harrison and Popke, 2018). After the hurricane, the utility was technically bankrupt; consumers struggled to pay their bills, facing rising oil prices on the international markets; and foreign investors faced financial losses when PREPA bonds defaulted. The government responded by privatising PREPA, while communities with stronger ties to the ruling party had their connections restored first (Smith-Nonini, 2020; Tormos-Aponte et al., 2021). Under protest, citizen groups called on policymakers to instead couple the recovery and reconstruction efforts with a just energy transition to confront the climate vulnerability and debt crisis that contributed to producing hurricane hazard in the first place (de Onís, 2021; López-Gómez, 2025).

Disaster mitigation: Renewables to the rescue?

While the status quo often persists in the aftermath of disaster, such moments can also open a space in which alternative visions of social life are heard and contested (Blackburn, 2018; Dickinson, 2018; Manuel-Navarrete et al., 2011). Disaster risk reduction is ultimately an issue of deliberately transforming human-environment relations to minimise the production of hazards, rather than merely responding to their effects (O’Brien, 2012; Pelling, 2011; Pelling and Dill, 2010). The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 reflects this transformative potential by promoting the principle of Building Back Better – not merely restoring pre-disaster conditions, but enhancing resilience and wellbeing post-disaster (UNDRR, 2015; see also Collodi et al., 2021; Pelling et al., 2022). One of the framework’s defined targets is to reduce damage to critical infrastructure and basic services, but perhaps unsurprisingly, this target is operationalised through technical solutions such as retrofitting, maintenance, and infrastructural relocation (UNDRR, 2015: 19, 21–22). Such a technocratic approach is likely to overlook the deeper political dimensions of reconstruction, and the opportunity it presents for promoting alternative, locally grounded visions and interests.

Energy services are central to this political dimension. Given energy’s role as a necessity for life, and its metabolic function in enabling other infrastructures, access to energy is essential to any process of post-disaster reconstruction. Yet the Sendai Framework makes no explicit mention of energy, reflecting a broader tendency to treat it as a technical rather than political issue (cf. Nightingale et al., 2020). On the contrary, the rebuilding of energy systems is a political act that determines whose capabilities are supported and shapes social futures. Post-disaster reconstruction can, therefore, be a moment to ask what kinds of energy services people need to live well and equitably. An energy transition in the wake of disaster can also be a strategic pathway to achieve a goal of Building Back Better, granted that it pivots around questions of energy vulnerability and energy justice (Popke and Harrison, 2018). However, an externally mandated post-disaster strategy like Building Back Better also risks reproducing colonial legacies and enhancing marginalisation, for example through displacement in the name of risk reduction (Mendes Barbosa and Coates, 2021; Parsons and Fisher, 2022; Sultana, 2022).

Moreover, while energy is a necessity for life, it is also a potential hazard, particularly when governance is exclusionary or profit trumps the concerns of local communities. The implications of ‘low-carbon risk society’ remain poorly understood (Sovacool, 2025), and more research is needed, as noted, into the production of low- and post-carbon hazardscapes. One key area is the enhanced electrification of societies, which is often deemed essential for low-carbon energy use. Adderley et al. (2018) warn that electric vehicles can make evacuations more difficult in hazardscapes if electricity supplies fail, charging stations become unavailable, or mass charging overloads grids. Electrocution is another hazard that can become more prominent in climate-stressed energy landscapes, seeing that contact with downed wires is a leading cause of flood and storm related deaths (Jonkman and Kelman, 2005; Rappaport and Blanchard, 2016). In the United States, utilities now also de-energise grids during heatwaves to pre-empt igniting wildfires. However, these so-called Public Safety Power Shutoffs disproportionally affect vulnerable communities, so much so that Ptak et al. (2024: 7) describe them as ‘a new type of hazard’. While energy transitions eliminate some hazards, they inevitably also produce new ones.

Many observers equate the Building Back Better agenda with solar energy solutions, arguing that the spatial characteristics of solar systems ‘make them safer at times of natural calamity’ (Bin Amin et al., 2021: 2; Mochizuki and Chang, 2017). Solar PV panels operate independently of extensive fuel supply chains and offer flexibility as they can be rapidly deployed in disaster zones (Qazi, 2017). In Japan, at the same time, less than 10% of medium to large-scale solar energy plants are found in hazard-prone areas, as they have been found vulnerable to landslide and flood damage (Hao et al., 2021). Damage to utility-scale solar infrastructure can have cascading effects on other infrastructures. Conceptually, the materialities of solar and other ‘green’ technologies are important to recognise, as such technologies can help reduce disaster risk. But in any given energy hazardscape, they can also contribute to the production of hazard. Analytically, there is a delicate line to tread between recognising the significance of materiality (Bakker and Bridge, 2006) and fetishising technology so that we uncritically ascribe agency to it (Hornborg, 2017).

Crucially, the benefits of larger-scale energy distribution still need to be assessed in relation to the dependence on political economic centres it brings with it in disaster contexts. While grid infrastructure often delivers large amounts of electric power, enabling energy services that reduce vulnerability (Sharma, 2019; van Bommel et al., 2024), decentralised solutions give users the benefit of distancing themselves from external dependencies and increasing autonomy (Cederlöf, 2023; Underwood et al., 2020). For example, after Nepal’s 2015 earthquake, many of the most energy-vulnerable communities abandoned centralised, ‘modern’ energy sources in favour of biomass fuels. Despite the known health risks, this shift gave them greater control over their fuel choices. As an energy transition, the shift raises a paradox: those deemed energy vulnerable may, in fact, be more energy secure than those relying on centralised energy infrastructures in hazard-prone areas (Herington and Malakar, 2016). There appears to be no definitive answer, therefore, to whether large-scale or small-scale, centralised or decentralised energy systems most effectively reduce disaster risk. The risks associated with energy infrastructure do not rise from spatial form itself but from the socio-natural production of that form within an energy hazardscape. Ultimately, an energy system’s effectiveness in reducing disaster risk depends less on its form than on the social relations that shape how energy is accessed, controlled, and used.

Conclusion

Energy, as I have argued, plays two often contradictory roles in social life: it is both a necessity and a hazard – its infrastructures capable of sustaining life and producing harm. Yet, at a time when climate change requires new patterns of energy use, the relationship between energy transition and disaster risk reduction remains insufficiently understood. This article brings perspectives from energy geographies into critical disaster studies to examine how energy systems shape disaster risk and disaster outcomes. The central conclusion is that energy must be treated not as a neutral or ‘natural’ phenomenon separate from society, but rather as a socio-natural concept – deeply embedded in political, economic, and cultural processes – around which disaster outcomes inevitably vary. As both a metabolic requirement giving rise to vulnerability and as a hazard, ‘energy’ disrupts binary distinctions between vulnerability and hazards. Instead, it reveals a dialectical relationship in which the two co-produce each other in energy hazardscapes. Given its dual role, energy must be analytically positioned as an independent variable in the production of vulnerability, hazard, and risk. It is a constitutive element in how disasters unfold and societies respond.

A low-carbon energy transition, while aimed at mitigating climate change, reconfigures landscapes of hazard and vulnerability. As energy infrastructures become increasingly exposed to climate hazards, they can become hazards themselves through cascading and compounding interactions (Gill and Malamud, 2014). These dynamics unfold within energy hazardscapes that are frequently shaped by profit-driven development, colonial legacies, and ideologies that naturalise risk and vulnerability (Behn and Bakker, 2019; Datta et al., 2022; Huber, 2019). In effect, societies investing in infrastructure designed to reduce carbon emissions simultaneously introduce new risk factors (Sovacool, 2025), creating dependencies and power asymmetries that must be critically assessed (Lohmann, 2024; López-Gómez, 2025). Approaching energy infrastructure as a socio-natural hazard allows us to move beyond technical framings and address the deeper causes of disaster risk (Pelling, 2011; Wisner et al., 2004).

Meanwhile, energy systems are a crucial determinant of vulnerability through their spatially uneven patterns of access and control. Provided that energy metabolises all social practices, its availability shapes who can prepare for, endure, and recover from disaster. Reducing energy vulnerability so that people can achieve essential capabilities must be central to disaster preparedness (van Bommel et al., 2024). For the same reason, energy justice must guide disaster recovery and the broader transformations needed to reduce disaster risk (Kaufmann et al., 2024; Underwood et al., 2020). These insights point to a final critical aspect: placing energy at the centre of disaster studies enables a more precise and politically grounded understanding of what equitable preparedness, recovery, and risk reduction might entail. Emphasising questions of energy vulnerability, an energy hazardscape framework here offers a powerful tool for aligning the goal of energy transition with risk reduction. It helps us see that the promise of energy transition is not only to mitigate climate change, but also to transform the unequal, often colonially patterned conditions under which disaster risk is produced and distributed.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Don Mitchell and Carlos Tornel along with three anonymous reviewers for their critical reading of earlier versions of this article.

ORCID iD

Gustav Cederlöf

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Gustav Cederlöf is an Associate Professor of Environmental Social Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research interests include the political and cultural dimensions of environmental change, with a focus on energy use.

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