Thompson Reuters Foundation - The world has made important progress towards improving energy efficiency, using more renewable sources of power and providing basic electricity to every household over the last two decades.
But the gains have barely been enough to keep up with population growth and surging energy demand and are far short of what is needed to curb climate change, a new UN-backed energy report suggests.
In the last 10 years, 1.7 billion people around the world gained access to electricity. But the world's population grew by 1.6 billion over that same period, nearly wiping out the gains. Similarly, rising energy demand effectively eliminated half the energy efficiency savings and 70 percent of the gains from growth in renewable energy over the past decade.
"Even to stand still, we have to run extremely fast. That's the challenge," said Vivien Foster, a sustainable energy leader at the World Bank and one of the lead authors of the Global Tracking Framework report.
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But the gains have barely been enough to keep up with population growth and surging energy demand and are far short of what is needed to curb climate change, a new UN-backed energy report suggests.
In the last 10 years, 1.7 billion people around the world gained access to electricity. But the world's population grew by 1.6 billion over that same period, nearly wiping out the gains. Similarly, rising energy demand effectively eliminated half the energy efficiency savings and 70 percent of the gains from growth in renewable energy over the past decade.
"Even to stand still, we have to run extremely fast. That's the challenge," said Vivien Foster, a sustainable energy leader at the World Bank and one of the lead authors of the Global Tracking Framework report.
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