Should Energy be included in the Post-2015 Agenda, and How?

The Post-2015 Consensus' sixth set of papers is focuses on whether energy should be included in the post-2015 development agenda and, if so, how?

Nutritious food, clean water and basic healthcare for all may look like obvious high-priority targets for the international community, but we shouldn’t ignore energy. The use of wood and coal in steam engines kicked off the Industrial Revolution, which led to today’s prosperous, modern societies. Reliable and affordable energy is just as vital for today’s developing and emerging economies. Driven mostly by its five-fold increase in coal use, China’s economy has grown 18-fold over the past thirty years while lifting 680 million people out of poverty.

When discussing energy targets for the post-2015 development agenda, an alluring option often discussed is moving toward clean energy, like wind, solar and hydro. Some are suggesting that developing countries move right to clean energy. All the while, rich countries are already finding the move away from coal and oil to be a difficult one, and there are no easy answers for developing economies.

Today, almost three billion people use biofuels (firewood, dung and crop waste) for cooking and heating indoors, which is so polluting, the World Health Organization estimates they kill one of every thirteen people that die on the planet. So, how about these almost-three billion cooking with dirty open fires? Should they take higher priority than the broader, long term objective of cutting back on fossil fuel use?

Economists, Isabael Galiana and Amy Sopinka, the writers of our main paper on energy, contend there are smart ways to move help on both accounts. However, the key message of their research is that increasing access to modern energy is an important driver of development and could save millions of lives each year by reducing indoor air pollution

Burning firewood and dung on open indoor fires is inefficient and causes horrendous air pollution. More than four million people each year die from respiratory illness because of smoke from indoor open fires. Most of these are women and young children. Women and children are also the ones who have to spend their time fetching firewood, often from quite far away. Providing cleaner cooking facilities – efficient stoves which run on liquefied gas – would improve health, increase productivity, allow women to spend time earning money and free up children to go to school.

The economic benefits of getting everyone off dung and wood are as high as the human welfare ones: more than $500 billion each year. Costs would be much lower. Including grants and subsidies to purchase stoves, annual costs would run about $60 billion. Every dollar spent would buy almost nine dollars of benefits, which is a very good way to help.

However, the economists also provide a more realistic target, which turns out to be even more efficient. Since it is awfully hard to get to 100%, they suggest providing modern cooking fuels to 30%. This will still help 780 million people, but at the much lower cost of $11 billion annually. For every dollar spent, we would do more than $14 worth of good.

While clean cooking is important, electricity can bring different benefits. Lighting means that students can study after dark and family activities can continue into the evening. Clinics can refrigerate vaccines and other medicines. Water can be pumped from wells so that women do not have to walk miles to fetch it.

To provide electricity to everyone we would need the equivalent of 250 more power stations, but many rural areas might best be served by solar panels and batteries. This is not an ideal solution, but would still be enough to make an enormous improvement to people’s lives. The overall cost is probably around $75 billion per year. That still does $5 of benefits for each dollar spent.

You can read the all the reports on energy targets for the post-2015 development agenda here, including the latest research series on Energy targets. Isabel Galiana, Lecturer in the Department of Economics at McGill University and Amy Sopinka, Senior Research Analyst at Institute for Integrated Energy Systems at University of Victoria write the main report, peer-reviewed in Perspective papers by Adele C. Morris, Fellow and Policy Director for the Climate and Energy Economic Project at Brookings Institute, and by Todd Moss, Chief Operating Officer, and Madeleine Gleave at the Center for Global Development. Additionally, NGOs and stakeholders such as Innovation: Africa and the Development Bank of South Africa present Viewpoint papers concerning Galiana and Sopinka’s analysis.