The Kouga Wind Farm is a renewable energy project which makes the most of the fresh onshore breezes that sweep the Eastern Cape coastline of South Africa. Situated approximately 70km southwest of Port Elizabeth – between Oyster Bay and St Francis Bay – the wind farm delivers 80 megawatts of grid-connected capacity in the quest to power the country’s low-carbon future. Picture: David Ritchie/African News Agency(ANA)
Participants in the Pre-Assembly Day of the Fifteenth session of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) Assembly in Abu Dhabi on the session on “SDG 7 on Sustainable Energy: The Road Ahead” said governments and development finance institutions (DFI) needed to “walk the talk” and turn commitments into action.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) were formulated in 2015 and SDG 7 aims at ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy such as electricity, which is a key to the development of agriculture, business, communications, education, healthcare and transportation.
The SDG 7 session included stakeholders from the private and public sectors, as well as energy providers to discuss ways to accelerate progress on SDG 7 and to shape a pathway to a collaborative and ambitious energy agenda by 2030.
Participants highlighted the need to rapidly scale up existing sustainable solutions by creating and investing in enabling infrastructure so that achieving universal energy access could help with delivering across the development agenda including on related goals such as poverty reduction, climate action, gender equality, health and green industrialization. International cooperation was highlighted to ensure that the digital and energy divides could be bridged.
Riad Meddeb, the director of the Sustainable Energy Hub, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), said that to close the finance gap and achieve the 2030 goals, we need to adopt integrated strategies to achieve universal energy access and other developmental goals. Bridging the gap between commitments and actions was key to guiding policy.
Gauri Singh, the Deputy Director-General of IRENA, said that for the first time in this decade, there have been reverses in basic energy access, highlighting the need for urgent investment and action to reach universal energy access goals.
She added that with only five years left until 2030, efforts should strongly focus on long-term energy planning and policies which need to be embedded in national strategies of countries, emphasising the need to keep the least developed countries and marginalised groups in mind to shape the energy landscape of the future as 18 out of 20 countries that were unlikely to achieve the SDG 7 goals were located in sub-Saharan Africa.
“We have a lot of work to do. We need to start working together efficiently and we need all hands on deck to achieve universal energy access," Hans Olav Ibrekk, the Special Envoy for Climate and Security at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said.
Rasha Abdrabu, from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), said that there was a need to promote actions on the ground to improve policy coherence, unlock investments and demonstrate new technologies and build local capacities especially for women and youth.
“Prioritising innovation and infrastructure is key to unlocking the tools and technologies needed to realise the goals of green industry, decarbonisation, socio-economic development, and closing energy access gaps,” Abdrabu said.
“We have to maximise cooperation and act collectively to reform the developmental finance systems in order to channel funds on the just energy transition to make universal energy access a reality,” Stefano Marguccio, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of SEforALL, said.
Participants noted that achieving the SDG 7 goal would also enable the achievement of other SDG goals such as gender equality as females were the sufferers when using biomass fuel such as wood to cook, while also having to gather water by hand, which could be easier provided by electric pumps.
“Achieving universal energy access goes hand in hand with achieving gender equality, requiring cross-sector collaboration and mobilising action among public and private entities to shape efforts globally so that nobody is left behind in the energy transition,” Sheila Oparaocha, Director, ENERGIA Network, concluded.