The seventh Sustainable Development Goal in the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda focuses on providing affordable and clean energy for all, which is unfortunately not progressing fast enough to keep up with its targets, especially in the Philippines.
At the current global pace in prioritizing access to affordable energy, around 660 million people will still lack access to electricity and almost two billion people will still have to rely on polluting fuels and technologies for cooking by 2030.
According to the UN’s 2024 Sustainable Development Report, the Philippines is still falling behind in its affordable and clean energy targets, as the country continues to face significant challenges across the board, and progress is mostly stagnating or increasing at less than 50 percent of the required rate.
Though the country is on track or maintaining SDG achievement with regard to access to electricity, the other target indicators for SDG7 are still facing significant to major challenges, and progress on renewable energy share in total final energy consumption is decreasing, alongside other stagnant indicators.
As of 2021, coal and oil, which are the biggest sources of energy in the country, took up 31 percent and 30 percent of the total energy supply, respectively. The transport and residential sectors take up the largest portions of total final consumption at 31 and 29 percent, respectively.
An attempt to help combat the country’s high energy consumption and design a more sustainable energy blueprint came when the National Renewable Energy Board introduced the National Renewable Energy Program for 2020 to 2040. It sets a target of at least 35 percent RE share in the power generation mix by the year 2030, and growth to at least 50 percent by 2040.
Being so far behind a sustainable development goal is not a big thing for the Philippines, as we have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to other goals. However, since the goal and the blueprint is already there, it shouldn’t hurt to still try to achieve this particular goal, which has long reaching impacts for the country and our contribution to mitigating the effects of climate change and global warming.
Hopefully our government is still committed to making this goal happen.*
