Scaling up access to electricity and clean cooking, boosting the use of renewable energy and infrastructure development, improving energy efficiency and ensuring adequate finance—all are key pillars for the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7) of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Meeting the environmental and socioeconomic goals of the wider SDG agenda depends closely on SDG 7 and calls for a fundamental shift in energy production, distribution, and consumption, supported by enhanced ambition, long- term planning, greater investment, enabling policies, continued innovation and strong international cooperation.
Over the past ten years, the world has made tremendous progress on SDG 7, but action must be accelerated to achieve our common goals. This is especially important in view of global crises that have the potential of slowing or reversing gains made in recent years.
Since its first edition in 2018, Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report has become the global reference for information on progress toward SDG 7, the aim of which is to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all.” This report therefore summarizes global progress on electricity access, clean cooking, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and international financial flows in support of clean energy. It presents updated statistics for each of the indicators and provides policy insights on priority areas and actions needed to spur further progress on SDG 7.
The report is produced annually by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), the World Bank, and the World Health Organization (WHO)—the five custodian agencies responsible for tracking progress toward SDG 7. Figure ES.1 offers a snapshot of the primary indicators.
Despite substantial progress since 2015—including significant increases in the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix and improvements in the global rate of energy efficiency—the achievement of the 2030 target of universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services remains off track and uneven, particularly with respect to the huge remaining energy access gap in Sub-Saharan Africa.
However, much headway can still be made on the road to SDG 7. Technologies are available, the costs of renewables and batteries have fallen dramatically, the policy architecture is expanding, and investment resources are available to be tapped. Accelerating progress will depend on closer collaboration among governments, the private sector, international organizations, and civil society. What is required now is urgency, coordination, and the political will to match commitments with resources, thus ensuring that the benefits of the energy transition reach every person, in every region, including the most vulnerable communities that the current trajectory risks leaving behind.
The global energy transition is unfolding against a backdrop of compounding crises that have repeatedly disrupted progress and whose full implications remain uncertain at the time of this publication. Successive shocks have underscored the fact that progress toward SDG 7 depends not only on ambitious policy, but also on geopolitical stability and the resilience of international cooperation. In this context, accelerating renewable energy deployment and improving energy efficiency in line with SDG 7 provide a critical opportunity for strengthening energy security by diversifying energy sources, reducing dependence on fossil fuel imports, and bolstering macroeconomic resilience.
This approach gains importance and urgency as the economic consequences of high energy prices are depleting already constrained fiscal reserves in many countries, leaving developing economies, in particular, vulnerable to subsequent financial shocks.
The report presents a detailed status of progress toward each of the SDG 7 indicators, namely, (i) access to electricity; (ii) access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking; (iii) renewable energy as a share of energy consumption; (iv) energy efficiency; and (v) international financial flows in support of clean and renewable energy.
