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Share of people with reliance on clean fuels and technology at the household level.

Cooking, lighting and heating represent a large share of household energy use across the low- and middle-income countries. For cooking and heating, households typically rely on solid fuels or kerosene paired with inefficient. It is well known that reliance on such inefficient energy for cooking, heating and lighting is associated with high levels of household air pollution. The use of inefficient fuels for cooking alone is estimated to cause over 4 million deaths annually, mainly among women and children. This is more than TB, HIV and malaria combined.

Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB); Public Utilities Commission (PUC)

Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB); Public Utilities Commission (PUC)

Annual

Percentage (%)

The health impacts can be avoided by adopting clean fuels and technologies for all main household energy end-or in some circumstances by adopting advanced combustion cook stoves (i.e. those which achieve the emission rates targets provided by the WHO guidelines) and adopting strict protocols for their safe use. Given the importance of clean and safe household energy use as a human development issue, universal access to energy among the technical practitioner community is currently taken to mean access to both electricity and clean fuels and technologies for cooking, heating and lighting. For this reason, clean cooking forms part of the universal access objective under the UN Secretary General’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative.

Access to Clean Fuels refers to the percentage of final consumption of energy that is derived from renewable resources. A number of definitions of renewable energy exist; what they have in common is highlighting as renewable all forms of energy that their consumption does not deplete their availability in the future. These include solar, wind, ocean, hydropower, geothermal resources, and bioenergy (in the case of bioenergy, which can be depleted, sources of bioenergy can be replaced within a short to medium-term frame). Importantly, this indicator focuses on the amount of renewable energy actually consumed rather than the capacity for renewable energy production, which cannot always be fully utilized. “Clean” is defined by the emission rate targets and specific fuel recommendations (i.e. against unprocessed coal and kerosene).

Disaggregated estimates for different end-uses (i.e. cooking, heating and lighting; with expected improvements in household surveys, this will be possible for heating and lighting for all countries. Disaggregation of access to clean fuel and technologies for cooking by rural or urban place of residence is possible for all countries. Gender disaggregation by main user (i.e. cook) of cooking energy will be available with expected improvements in household surveys. Gender disaggregation of head of household for cooking, lighting and heating is available.

The indicator is modelled with household survey data compiled by WHO. The information on cooking fuel use and cooking practices comes from about 800 nationally representative survey and censuses. Survey sources include Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Living Standards Measurement Surveys (LSMS), Multi-Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), the World Health Survey (WHS), and other nationally developed and implemented surveys.

This indicator can be used to measure the proportion of population with primary reliance on clean fuels and technology.

The indicator uses the type of primary fuels and technologies used for cooking, heating, and lighting as a practical surrogate for estimating human exposure to household (indoor) air pollution and its related disease burden, as it is not currently possible to obtain nationally representative samples of indoor concentrations of criteria pollutants, such as fine particulate matter and carbon monoxide.

Substantial progress has already been made toward developing and piloting a new methodology known as the Multi-Tier Framework for Measuring Energy Access (World Bank) which is able to capture the affordability and reliability of energy access explicitly referenced in the language of SDG7 and harnesses the normative guidance in the WHO guidelines to benchmark tiers of energy access.

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.