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Key Issues at WSSD: Energy for Sustainable Development
Clean Energy Critical for the Poor, Women and the Environment
Part FIVE in a series of background resources for journalists. Click here for more information
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August 26 - Energy has been a driving force for human progress and enhanced quality of life since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Two hundred and fifty years later, energy is central to economic development in virtually every corner of the world. Energy is the essential ingredient for cooking our food, powering our transportation systems, fueling heating and cooling systems, running our factories and generating the power needed to obtain electricity. Fossil fuels – oil, coal, gas – are the primary engines of economic life. But it is increasingly apparent that these energy sources have profound negative implications for environmental life. With rapid population growth and rising consumption expected in the future, charting a new energy future is crucial and will be among the key issues at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be held August 26 – September 4, 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Energy Expansion in the 20th Century
The degree to which countries have harnessed and utilized energy over the past 100 years has helped to distinguish the world’s developed and developing nations. In the past 100 years, use of fossil fuels has grown 20-fold and the use of traditional forms of energy has tripled. The differences between wealthy and poor nations could not be more stark: in 2000, residents of North America consumed 287 million BTUs of energy per capita, whereas residents of Africa consumed 15 million BTUs of energy per capita. Globally, developed countries consume ten times more energy per capita as do residents of developing countries.
All told, world energy use increased to 400 quadrillion BTUs in 2000, from less than 350 “quads” in 1990. The world meets its energy needs with a variety of sources, as follows:
Oil – 35%
Coal – 24%
Gas – 21%
Traditional Biomass – 9%
Nuclear – 7%
Hydroelectricity – 2%
Modern Biomass – 2%
For additional information about the world’s primary energy sources, click here.
Energy Inequities in the 21st Century
Even in today’s seemingly modern world, more than 2 billion people have no access to modern supplies of energy, relying instead on traditional, inefficient biomass like wood, animal dung, and charcoal, which are gathered at great hardship and significant environmental cost. Because they lack energy security, the productivity of one third of the earth’s population is severely compromised; perhaps as much as another third suffer economic hardship and insecurity due to unreliable energy supplies.
The inequities in access to and consumption of energy constitute a serious impediment to sustainable development. Improving worldwide access to electricity, clean heat, and other modern energy services will help eliminate poverty, protect the health of impoverished populations, expand access to education, and safeguard the environment.
As nations grow – demographically and economically – the need for energy and energy services increases too. Not surprisingly, then, energy use is growing fastest in developing nations, at a rate up to 2.5 times as fast as developed nations. Under current trends, global energy use will double from 1998 levels by 2035 and triple by 2055.
Transportation, where 95% of the energy consumed is derived from petroleum, is among the fastest growing sectors, with the global automobile fleet expected to increase to 1 billion in 2025, from today’s 600 million. Transportation-related energy use is expected to increase by 3.8% per year in the developing world as transportation infrastructures, populations and economies expand, and by 1.7% in industrialized countries, where transportation systems are already established.
For more information on current and future levels of energy use, click here.
Energy and the Environment
Whether the energy sources used to meet development needs are clean, modern sources, or traditional, polluting fossil fuels, will largely determine if humanity is able to achieve sustainability. It is imperative that developing nations be provided with clean energy services needed to leapfrog current technology and development in an environmentally sound manner.
There is no question but that modern energy services can vastly improve the opportunities and choices available to people seeking a better standard of living. But it is equally clear that current technologies exact a significant price in terms of the environment and human health. These impacts extend from the local to the global. At the local level, the use of biomass energy impacts human health even more profoundly than air pollution from burning fossil fuels. At the global level, the burning of fossil fuels is building up greenhouse gases and causing the Earth’s climate to change.
To learn more about energy, climate change and the environment, click here.
Impact of Energy Resources on Women
In rural areas, women and girls usually shoulder the work of gathering fuel for cooking and heating. When this becomes more difficult due to deforestation or environmental degradation, women’s daily workloads increase, placing additional demands on their time, energy, and health. Women overburdened by work responsibilities are more likely to keep their daughters out of school to help them with household tasks, which has the long-term effect of limiting their daughters’ future opportunities and increasing the likelihood that they will remain impoverished.
The indoor burning of traditional biomass fuels can cause respiratory infections, lung diseases, cancer, and eye problems – with the overwhelming majority of impacts on women and children. In a household that uses traditional fuels, the smoke a woman breathes in during a single day is roughly equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes. That is why women and children account for most of the two million premature deaths per year caused by indoor air pollution.
Improving women’s access to modern energy resources would have many positive effects. Subsistence activities such as cooking, grain grinding, and water pumping would be much less time-consuming and labor-intensive, and would also virtually eliminate the harmful health effects of cooking with biomass fuels. When energy is readily available to women, opportunities to improve their livelihoods are greatly improved, through such activities as agricultural production, small-scale manufacturing, food processing, and trading and marketing opportunities.
For more information on the impact of energy resources on women, click here.
Energy for the Future
As global population and rates of consumption increase, it is predicted that worldwide energy use will grow at the rate of 2% a year. Much of this increase will take place in the developing world. In Asia and Central and South America, in particular, consumption is expected to more than double by 2020, accounting for half of the total projected increase in world energy consumption.
The primary challenge for the future will be to provide the benefits of energy security to all of the world’s populations, while ensuring that the byproducts of energy use do not degrade the global environment irreparably. A number of approaches would help meet the challenge of sustainable development, including:
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More efficient use of energy, especially at the point of “end use”, such as vehicles, buildings, electrical appliances, and production processes;
- Accelerated development and deployment of new energy technologies in developed and developing countries, particularly improved fossil-fuel technologies that produce virtually no harmful emissions;
- Increased utilization of renewable energy sources, including solar, wind, geothermal, biomass and hydropower, which have the potential to provide energy with zero or almost zero emissions of both air pollutants and greenhouse gases. Renewable energy is hugely abundant resource; the flow of energy reaching the earth from the sun is ten thousand times larger than the current amount of global energy use.
For more information renewable/alternative energy, click here.
In addition, expansion of basic health efforts, including reproductive health efforts are critical to ensuring that all the world’s citizens are able to achieve the highest standard of health, free from pollution and insufficient access to basic services.
Energy Issues at the WSSD
Energy will feature prominently in the final deliberations at the WSSD. In particular, debate is expected on:
1)proposals to set “targets and timetables” for the adoption of renewable and other clean sources of energy – including a proposal to ensure that renewable energy accounts for up to 15 percent of global energy supply by 2010;
2)language urging nations to phase out energy subsidies – including a proposal that developed countries reduce energy subsidies substantially by 2007;
3)efforts to encourage the transfer of environmentally-sound energy technologies to developing countries – including on preferential and concessional terms
4)efforts to advance early ratification and implementation of the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
To see the Framework for Action on Energy, which will be discussed at the WSSD, click here.
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