Publications in flight

An honest running audit — where each piece actually sits, what’s blocking it, what’s next. Anything with “ready” means analytically complete and awaiting a specific action, not an aspirational timeline.

Ecological Economics — Research Article

Where does emergy accounting give new information? A systematic cross-country evaluation of 36 emergy-native metrics against 40 mainstream outcomes

Status: v9 draft, ~11,000 words, PDF re-rendered. Systematic ΔR² evaluation across a 1,520-cell grid; Odum-tradition claims tested against modern data; Energy Adequacy framing threaded through household EROI ↔︎ HEII quantile spread ↔︎ societal NER ↔︎ MEP (Q3.18). Six falsification steps run on the Q3.16-E2 renewables → life-expectancy puzzle; Q3.24 closes it (demographic transition, −0.52 years per pp elderly share, p = 2.2e-9). Q3.34 extends the demographic control across the full 918-cell grid: 288/309 significant findings (93%) survive robust. Q3.33 Kigali F-gas amendment + Q3.35A oil-price shocks form the paper’s natural-experiment pair (external policy shock × external price shock). Q3.35B projects the alpha grid onto native UN SDG indicators; Q3.35C projected onto a Doughnut-Economics country snapshot (initial 17-dimension construction, since superseded). Q3.36 + Q3.37 extend the framework outward into finance and close the Doughnut: (a) capital-market alpha — sovereign debt levels are predicted by sector_industrial (ΔR² = 0.219, p = 3e-8) and by heii_norm_p10 on debt-service burden (ΔR² = 0.177, p = 8e-4); equity outcomes show weaker alpha (boundary claim: emergy captures physical-provisioning that debt finances, not forward growth options); (b) the full 21-dimension Doughnut (12 social-floor + 9 ecological-ceiling) with continuous signed distance-from-boundary; (c) cross-benchmark validation of the Q3.35A oil-shock finding across Brent, Dubai, WTI, average (all +0.27 to +0.29 coefficients, p < 5e-3). Q3.43 names the mechanism: UPBEAT (World Bank / ESMAP) + LAC-UB + ESMAP RISE + AfDB ERI harmonised into one 39,000-row country-year utility + regulatory panel, z-normalised within (source, indicator). heii_norm_p90 predicts utility Collection Rate at ΔR² = +0.73 (p = 7e-12, N = 52) — utility financial stress is the intermediate mechanism the Q3.36A sovereign-debt result pointed at. Q3.44B confirms the direction: within-country fixed-effect panel with 2-year cross-lag shows HEII_norm at t-2 forward-predicts Collection Rate at t (p = 0.036, N = 361, 52 countries), while the reverse lag is null (p = 0.81). Q3.44C extends to Afrobarometer R9+R10 microdata (39 countries × 9 items, all publicly downloadable): HEII_norm_p90 carries alpha only on lived_no_electricity (ΔR² = +0.23, p = 0.012), not on the four other lived-poverty items nor the perception items — HEII is a specifically-electricity signal, mediation is mechanical not cultural. Q3.46B robustness: swapping the GDP-per-capita baseline for household private consumption (WB NE.CON.PRVT.PC.KD) survives across 3,117 refitted cells — 235 findings survive or strengthen, 73 weaken or become fragile, 46 new findings emerge under the cleaner baseline. The flagship collection_rate ← heii_norm cell nearly doubles (ΔR² = +0.37 → +0.71) under the consumption baseline; consumption is now the paper’s preferred specification. Q3.46C identification: with a Gini-implied log-normal multiplier on the annual HEII panel, the P90 rung enters the cross-lag directly — forward p = 5×10⁻⁵ (N = 356, 51 countries), reverse null (p = 0.92). Direction of causality identified within country and over time.

Reproduction: 12 scripts wired into a documented pipeline; every figure and table is regeneratable from the tagged commit.

Next: external co-author read + finalise which corresponding- author byline lands. No analytical blockers.

Read the PDF →  ·  Source Rmd →

Joule — Research Article

Global synthesis of household energy burden via open spatial microsimulation

Status: draft rendered with 5 embedded figures, 7 pages, Cell Press Highlights + reviewer line numbers. Cover letter drafted with suggested reviewers named.

Contribution: 129 countries × 17,028 cells synthesis; Nh aggregation correction; cross-signal PCA + archetype clustering across the household-energy landscape; 67× per-capita mismatch quantification.

Next: internal re-read against the current data (Q3.7-Q3.23 enrichments), then external co-author read.

See the draft →

Science — Policy Forum

The climate-justice mismatch: quantifying who pays for whose emissions

Status: draft at 1,183 words (target 1,500). Cover letter drafted. Headline result is the same 67-fold per-capita cumulative CO2 disparity that anchors the Joule Contribution — condensed to a policy-actionable claim.

Blockers: ORCID for corresponding-author byline; graphical figure at 300 dpi (one map, one bar chart).

See the draft →

JOSS — Package Papers (Wave 1)

emburden, emburdendata, emburdensynth

Status: all three JOSS-READY (internal QA score ≥ 75). Cover letters templated; JOSS metadata YAML drafted for each.

Blockers: ORCID (JOSS submission form requires it).

Wave 2 (READY): emburdenweather, emburdenhealth, emburdengeo. Submit after Wave 1 lands. Wave 3: emburdenstats, emburdenutil, emburdener, emburdenvis, emburdenpub, emburdentest, emburdenplus.

JSS — Software Paper

The emburden ecosystem

Status: 9-section skeleton drafted. Target 8,000-10,000 words. Covers all 13 R packages plus emburdensynth’s synthetic microdata pipeline, with a worked global-synthesis application in the last section.

Model papers: tidyverse (JOSS 2019), scikit-learn (JMLR 2011), sf (R Journal 2018), fixest (R Journal 2019).

Next: writing time. No data or credential blockers.

See the skeleton →

Scientific Data — Data Descriptor

The emburdensynth global cell-level parquet

Status: not yet drafted. Queued behind Joule (the Joule methods paper is the natural citation anchor; drafting the descriptor first would leave it referring to a not-yet-published methods paper).

Once written: documents the 17,028-cell × 50-field parquet as a citable dataset with a Zenodo DOI, so downstream users can cite the data independently of the methods paper.

Blockers: Joule submission at least under-review, plus a Zenodo record upload (still open — see emburdensynth/R/global_data_download.R for the empty record_id fields).

Nature Energy — Research Article (scoping)

DERs × natural hazards × health outcomes

Status: 10-section scoping document only. Analysis cannot begin without upstream data.

Data blockers: EM-DAT (natural hazards catalog), GDELT (event-level media coverage), IHME GBD (health outcomes at fine geography). Each needs credentials or an institutional agreement.

Anticipated headline once unblocked: distributed energy resources reduce excess mortality during heat waves in high-burden populations by ~2 deaths/100k per 10% DER penetration. This is a prediction based on US-branch (asthma-analysis, outage-analysis) work that Q3.16-E1 lifted to global grain at n=63 and n=178.

See the scope →

Publication strategy

Each paper answers a different question at a different scale, so a single methodological debate can’t unravel the whole stack. Reviewers at each stage inherit peer-reviewed context from the layer below.
  • JOSS package papers — package-level DOIs for every dependency
  • JSS umbrella — architectural rationale; downstream papers cite it
  • Scientific Data — dataset itself as a citable object
  • Joule — validated tool + data applied to a global synthesis
  • Science Policy Forum — 1,500-word policy-actionable condensation
  • Ecological Economics — the emergy methodological question, isolated
  • Nature Energy — causal-identification argument built on the validated dataset

What’s actually blocking what

  • ORCID blocks four items: Ecological Economics byline, Science Policy Forum submission, JOSS Wave 1 metadata, JSS authorship. Registration is free and takes ~15 minutes at orcid.org/register. This is the single cheapest unlock in the queue.
  • EM-DAT / GDELT / IHME GBD credentials block Nature Energy. Each is a separate access request; expect 2-4 weeks per institution.
  • Zenodo record upload blocks Scientific Data (and populates emburdensynth/R/global_data_download.R:20-24).
  • External co-author read is the last-mile blocker on Ecological Economics and Joule — analytically complete, waiting on eyes.

Everything else is writing time.