A more serious commitment to energy efficiency could bring down global greenhouse gas emissions by nearly one-third by 2030 and get countries back on track to meet United Nations goal of ensuring energy access for all in this decade, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported last week.
Countries could achieve those emission cuts—and deliver the majority of the 45% reduction that UN agencies are calling for by 2030—by boosting annual efficiency improvements to 4% from today’s 2.2%, the IEA said. The IEA declared a decade of energy efficiency action and released an efficiency policy toolkit as it brought together 650 participants from more than 80 countries for its eighth annual conference on the topic.
- Be among the first to read The Energy Mix Weekender
- A brand new weekly digest containing exclusive and essential climate stories from around the world.
- The Weekender:The climate news you need.
At the end of the conference, ministers from 45 countries, including Canada, stated that energy efficiency plays “a critical role in improving living standards around the world, providing reliable and affordable and universal energy access, supporting economic growth, accelerating the clean energy transition toward net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, supporting energy security, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
But over the rest of this decade, “accelerated action and ambitious policy implementation are vital to addressing energy security and affordability whilst keeping us on track to achieve net-zero emissions,” they added.
Countries have adopted “increasingly stringent and ambitious targets and standards aimed at boosting energy efficiency and increasing energy savings whilst supporting sustainable economic growth,” the ministers said. But “additional ambitious measures from government, industry, and citizens are essential to address the energy crisis, energy transitions, climate change, and energy poverty.”
The IEA report distributed in conjunction with the conference “shows how doubling energy efficiency efforts can also deliver positive knock-on effects for society,” the agency said in a release. “With increased ambition, energy efficiency activities could lead to another 12 million jobs globally by 2030,” on top of the 10 million the sector already provides, while supporting “faster progress towards universal access to modern and affordable energy in emerging and developing economies.”
That latter objective was the subject of a separate IEA report, also released last week, that showed countries falling short of United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7: to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all.” While the last year has seen some progress, “the current pace is not adequate to achieve any of the 2030 targets,” the IEA warned. A billion people gained access to electricity between 2010 and 2021, but the pace of progress slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, 567 million people in sub-Saharan Africa without access to electric power account for 80% of the remaining global total.
Countries are also lagging on the goal of ensuring universal access to clean cooking by 2030. A 2019 estimate by the World Health Organization had 3.2 million people dying prematurely each year due to household air pollution from fuels and technologies for cooking. But “up to 2.3 billion people still use polluting fuels and technologies for cooking, largely in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia,” the IEA said.
“The use of traditional biomass also means households spend up to 40 hours a week gathering firewood and cooking, which prohibits women from pursuing employment or participating in local decision-making bodies and children from going to school.”
The report cites an uncertain global economy, high inflation, fluctuating exchange rates, the international debt crisis, supply chain bottlenecks, and “soaring prices for materials” among the factors impeding action on SDG7.
“The energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues to have a profound impact on people all around the world,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a release. “High energy prices have hit the most vulnerable hard, particularly those in developing economies. While the clean energy transition is moving faster than many think, there is still a great deal of work needed to deliver sustainable, secure, and affordable access to modern energy services for the billions of people who live without it.”
