The world may not be able to meet its targets in ensuring universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy by 2030 if efforts are not scaled up significantly, according to the new Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report released on 28 May 2020 by the International Energy Agency (IEA) the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), the World Bank, and the World Health Organization (WHO).
Current efforts, according to the report, are still wanting despite significant progress had been made on various aspects of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 prior to the start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. This includes a notable reduction in the number of people worldwide lacking access to electricity, increased deployment of renewable energy for electricity generation, and improvements in energy efficiency.
The number of people without access to electricity declined from 1.2 billion in 2010 to 789 million in 2018, however, under policies that were either in place or planned before the start of the COVID-19 crisis, an estimated 620 million people would still lack access in 2030, 85 percent of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Asia and the Pacific Region, there are still over 200 million people without access to electricity and 1.8 billion still rely on traditional biomass for cooking.
The share of renewable energy in the global energy mix needs to gather speed because it is going at a slow rate, despite significant capacity additions from wind and solar power in electricity generation. Energy efficiency improvement has also slowed down. The rate of improvement needs to speed up dramatically, from 1.7 percent in 2017 to at least 3 percent in the coming years. Get the full set of resources from the SDG7 Tracking Platform.