The belief that once science has established a limit to temperature increases, every nation will optimise activities to meet the goal is proving to be inaccurate. Since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, carbon emissions from energy use have increased from about 22 billion tonnes (BT) to over 35 BT in 2023, with significant but short-lived reductions recorded only during the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-22. Reasons include the divergence in priorities of the Global North and the Global South, and the absence of scalable and abundant energy sources that simultaneously meet the strategic priories of affordability, security, and sustainability in the Global South.

In the last 150 years, the Global North has enjoyed the benefits of higher greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, particularly carbon emissions, in the form of higher living standards with consequent higher per capita carbon emissions. Meanwhile, the Global South—victim of colonial exploitation and the resulting underdevelopment—is constrained in following the same path.

In 2023, the global average per-capita energy consumption was about 77 gigajoules (GJ), which is more than the minimum energy required for decent living. Out of about 90 countries and regions that include most of the world’s population, about 33 countries have energy consumption below 77 GJ. The average per-capita energy consumption in the African continent is just 14 GJ. Roughly a seventh of the global population, mostly in the Global South, live without electricity or with inadequate and irregular supply of electricity, and about a third rely on traditional fuels such as firewood to cook their meals.

The energy choices of India and Brazil offer insights into how the domestic constraints and strategic priorities of a country influence and complicate the pace of the energy transition in the Global South. Fossil fuels accounted for 76.5 percent of power generation in 2023-24 in India while non-fossil fuels (including hydropower and nuclear) accounted for the remaining 23.5 percent. India’s fuel choices for power generation reflect the pursuit of strategic goals of affordability, security, and sustainability: Coal offers affordability and security at the cost of sustainability; renewables offer sustainability at the cost of affordability and security; natural gas plays only a marginal role, though it can potentially offer some degree of sustainability because it compromises on the two critical domestic goals of affordability and security. Coal meets the domestic aspirations of energy access at the cost of global ambition for carbon reduction.

Brazil generated 91 percent of its electricity from clean sources in 2023, with hydropower dominating the mix at 60 percent. Brazil’s per-capita carbon emissions are well below the global average. In 2023, it had the second lowest carbon intensity of electricity generation among the G20 countries. Brazil has already surpassed its target of reaching 84 percent renewable electricity by 2030. Though Brazil is known as a country with the cleanest basket of fuels for power generation with falling carbon emission levels, fossil-fuel production, mainly oil and natural gas production, accounted for most of the increase in domestic energy production in Brazil in the last decade.

The dominant fuel choice for power generation—coal in the case of India and hydropower in the case of Brazil—are driven by domestic resource endowment, an accident of geography that makes the respective fuel source the most affordable while ensuring energy security. For the Global South to leapfrog to cleaner energy sources, these sources have to be truly dependable, scalable, and affordable. In the Global North, strategies for reindustrialisation that justify trade barriers are conflated with strategies for carbon emission reduction, which decreases affordability and increases the carbon reduction burden on the Global South.

Coal is the dominant fuel for power generation in India and South Africa. South Africa’s experience in phasing out coal illustrates the complexities of the energy transition. In 2023, South Africa was the largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of GDP. In the same year, fossil fuels (mainly coal) accounted for over 82 percent of total power generation in the country, and non-fossil fuels accounted for the rest. While there are available fuel options to diversify South Africa’s electricity mix, the affordability of electricity supply is a constraint on diversification.

At the United Nations Conference of the Parties in November 2021 (COP26), the G7-led Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), involving the governments of South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States (US), the European Union, France and Germany, announced that they will provide an initial commitment of US$8.5 billion towards financing South Africa’s decarbonisation efforts. Hailed as a revolutionary partnership agreement for decarbonisation in the Global South, a JETP was signed by South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam and, later, Senegal, with 90 percent of the finance package allocated for electricity sector reforms through traditional development finance institutions of the Global North and the remaining 10 percent for core just-transition objectives.

The Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme, which is part of the JETP, has attracted private-sector investments in renewable energy projects. However, the shutting down of South Africa’s Komati Power Station, a 63-year-old 1,000-megawatt coal-based plant, as part of JETP proved to be far more challenging. Heralded as one of the largest global “repurposing” projects, US$497 million was offered to convert the Komati coal plant into a renewable energy generation site. When Komati was “repurposed”, many people were left without work, which is devastating in a country where unemployment is high, at over 30 percent. The labour force in the coal sector prefers immediate rewards such as gainful employment over delayed gratification resulting from action on climate change—a phenomenon known in economics as ‘temporal discounting’.

Overall, the Global South (including China) accounted for more than 84 percent of global coal consumption in 2023. In the Global South, 26 countries (excluding China, India, and Indonesia) invested in coal-based power generation capacity after signing the Paris Agreement. Of these, five invested in coal-based power generation capacity for the first time. The key factor that influenced the decision to invest in coal was affordability.

In India, electrification rates in road transport are impressive only in the two-wheeler (2W) and three-wheeler (3W) segments, which receive subsidies under a government programme to promote electrification. Though 2Ws have a share of over 70 percent in vehicle numbers, four-wheelers dominate fuel consumption. This means that decarbonisation of the 2W segment will have limited effects on fuel consumption patterns.

To accelerate the decarbonisation of road transport, India has revived its programme for blending ethanol with petrol with target dates for achieving ambitious blending rates. By 2025, the government aims to achieve ethanol blending of 20 percent. In 2024, around 98 percent of road transportation fuel came from fossil fuels and 2 percent from biofuels in India. The Global Biofuel Alliance proposed by India aims to establish a global partnership of national governments, agencies, industries and other stakeholders to advance sustainable biofuels technology deployment and expand sustainable biofuels market penetration.

Brazil is the world’s second largest ethanol producer, behind the US, and the third largest biodiesel producer. One of the key challenges in India replicating Brazil’s success in biofuel production and use is resource endowment, particularly land and water resources. India’s arable land per capita is a third of that in Brazil and Brazil has 25 times India’s per-capita renewable water resources. Unintended consequences of the ethanol blending programme in India, such as the import of corn and ethanol, illustrate that the goals of decreasing fuel imports, reducing carbon emissions and increasing farmer incomes cannot be achieved simultaneously. Even in Brazil, the production of biofuel crops, especially crops for the production of first-generation bioethanol and biodiesel, have had negative impacts on the environment, particularly through land-use change and deforestation.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, 2024 was the warmest ever recorded in human history, with the average global temperature in the year being 1.5°C above the pre-industrial baseline for the first time, breaching the threshold set by the Paris Agreement. Above-average temperatures have become the norm in the last decade, with exceptionally hot summers across the world. In this context, the lack of essential indoor cooling in most parts of the Global South, which is a dimension of energy poverty, is troubling.

According to the ‘Cooling for All’ initiative, at least 3.43 billion people still face cooling access challenges in 2021, including 1.09 billion rural and urban poor at high risk and 2.34 lower-middle income people at medium risk. Access to space cooling (air-conditioning or AC) in the Global South is a climate-change adaptation measure that requires as much attention as carbon mitigation measures because access to space cooling can save thousands of lives. There is concern that AC use will increase the demand for energy, which can increase peak electricity demand, increase carbon emissions if the electricity is generated by using fossil fuels, affect electricity systems’ stability, and increase household spending on energy at the expense of other vital expenditure. According to estimates, a 1°C increase in temperature in the future will increase electricity consumption for space cooling by around 15 percent. India, which has more than 3,000 cooling degree days (CDDs) consumes just 70 kilowatt hours (kWh) for space cooling compared to 800 kWh in South Korea, which has only 750 CDDs. This disparity is mainly on account of low affordability of AC use in India.

Even if all theoretically possible efficiency gains are achieved, AC use is likely to remain the privilege of the affluent and aspiring classes. In India, the per-capita carbon emission of the lowest 50 percent of the population is 0.9 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (tCO₂eq) and 1.2 tCO₂eq for the middle 40 percent compared to 9.6 tCO₂eq for the top 10 percent. AC use, which consumes more electricity than all other electrical equipment in a typical affluent household in India, accounts for a large share of the CO₂ emissions of the top 10 percent.

In theory, there is recognition that funds should be allocated for efficient cooling. The Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program recognises the need for financing for access to cooling, but this recognition remains limited, given that financing needs continue to be poorly defined and tracked globally.

For progressive outcomes, climate action needs to: (i) reconcile with overarching aspirations in the Global South to catch up with the Global North economically and politically, (ii) acknowledge the significance of domestic energy resources for energy security and affordability, (iii) balance the Global North’s obsessions of investment in mitigation action with the adaptation needs of the Global South, (iv) formulate technology and fuel agnostic strategies that pave the way for a low-carbon future, (v) assess country-level climate action on the basis of qualitative parameters that reflect the right to human wellbeing and (vi) reduce trade barriers on low-carbon technologies to increase affordability and accelerate energy transition in the Global South.

Read the monograph here.

• Energy
• Climate Change
• India
• climate change global south
• energy consumption global south
• energy transition and global south
• global south countries
• global south countries climate change
• green energy transition
• green energy transition global south

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