Energy: Challenges and Opportunities Worldwide

Energy: Challenges and Opportunities Worldwide, 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity, and 2.4 billion people lack modern fuels for cooking and heating. Four out of fi ve people with no access to electricity live in developing countries and in rural areas, mainly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. This lack of adequate energy infrastructure forces more than a third of humanity – 3 billion people – to cook and heat their homes by burning wood, dung and crop waste. These families face an impossible dilemma: Cook with solid fuels and suffer the health consequences, or don’t eat a cooked meal.17 Smoke in the home leads to the deaths of nearly 800,000 children each year. Newborns and infants are often carried on their mother’s back while she is cooking, or kept close to the warm hearth. As a result, they spend many hours breathing polluted air during their fi rst year of life – just when their developing airways and their immune systems make them particularly vulnerable.18 Climate and weather infl uence the concentration of these materials in the air. Shifting from solid fuels to cleaner energy – for instance, liquifi ed petroleum gas, biogas or solar power – can potentially yield the largest reduction in indoor air pollution levels while minimizing the environmental impacts of energy production and consumption. Access to modern energy services improves a child’s access to education and helps retain girls and boys in school – especially girls, who traditionally fetch the fi rewood or other biomass fuels for cooking and heating. In China, programmes support affordable solar energy for pumping water, generating electricity and heating water for household use in rural areas. Additionally, the government is promoting household biogas plants to treat human excreta and pig manure through anaerobic digestion to generate methane – a greenhouse gas that becomes ‘green’ when burned – for cooking and lighting in rural households. The well digested sludge from the biogas latrine is used as organic fertilizer in the fi eld.