Towards a Sustainable Energy Future : The World Bank Group's Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Action Plan
The challenge for the development community is to exploit the links between energy and poverty to combat global poverty. The human scale of this challenge is huge. Today, 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity and 2.4 billion rely on traditi...
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| Language: | English en_US |
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Washington, DC
2013
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2004/06/16349535/towards-sustainable-energy-future-world-bank-groups-renewable-energy-energy-efficiency-action-plan http://hdl.handle.net/10986/14894 |
| Summary: | The challenge for the development
community is to exploit the links between energy and poverty
to combat global poverty. The human scale of this challenge
is huge. Today, 1.6 billion people lack access to
electricity and 2.4 billion rely on traditional biomass for
cooking and heating. Indoor air pollution is among leading
causes of illness and death in developing countries. It
leads to 2 million premature deaths a year. In 2004, the
richest 20 percent of the world s population consume 58
percent of total energy, while the poorest 20 percent
consume less than 4 percent. The majority of those
underserved are the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa and South
Asia. With increasing populations, 25 years from now,
business-as-usual energy scenarios project that even after
an expenditure of 16 trillion US dollars on energy
investments of which half will be in developing countries,
1.4 billion people will still lack access to electricity.
This is a reduction of only 200 million people from today.
Over 2.6 billion people in developing countries will
continue to rely on traditional forms of biomass for cooking
and heating in 2030, even more than today. This scenario
expects renewable energy share to increase from 2 percent to
3 percent between 2000 and 2030. Under this scenario, by
2030, the more than doubling of coal, oil and gas
consumption will lead to increases in greenhouse gas
emissions from the energy sector. The impacts will affect
the developing countries the most, and hence rendering the
poor more vulnerable. Projected impacts are increased deaths
and risk of infectious disease epidemics; increased floods,
mudslides and coastal and soil erosion; increased property
and infrastructure damage; decreased crops, higher crop
damages and a general drop in agricultural productivity. |
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