Sustainable Education and Development—Green Buildings

This book is Volume 2 of the proceedings of 2023 Sustainable Education and Development Research Conference. This volume concentrates on papers in the area of green buildings.

Despite considerable progress, more than 700 million people worldwide still lack access to electricity, and around 2.4 billion people continue to use harmful and polluting fuels for cooking. While efforts have been made to promote renewable energy and energy efficiency, they have not been fast enough to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 7. Adding to the challenge, the ongoing war in Ukraine has contributed to rising global energy prices and heightened energy insecurity in Europe. In response to the energy crisis, some European countries are planning to accelerate the transition to renewables and increase investments in clean energy and energy efficiency. However, others are considering a resurgence of coal, which poses a risk to the overall green transition.

Between 2010 and 2020, the percentage of the global population with access to electricity increased from 83% to 91%, with 1.3 billion people gaining access. Nevertheless, this leaves approximately 733 million people still without electricity, and most of them reside in sub-Saharan Africa. Achieving universal access by 2030, the annual growth rate in access needs to accelerate from 0.5 percentage points to 0.9 percentage points, necessitating significant efforts in low-income, fragile, and conflict-affected countries. In 2020, 69% of the global population had access to clean cooking fuels and technologies. While more than half of those without access to clean cooking fuels live in Asia, the 20 countries with the lowest percentage of people having access to clean cooking were predominantly least developed countries in Africa.

The share of renewable sources in total final energy consumption reached 17.7% globally in 2019, just slightly higher than the figure for 2015. The electricity sector leads in the adoption of renewables, accounting for 26.2% of total final energy consumption in 2019, while the heat and transport sectors have made limited progress.

Global primary energy intensity, defined as global total energy supply per unit of GDP, improved from 5.6 megajoules per dollar (2017 purchasing power parity) in 2010 to 4.7 megajoules in 2019. However, the rate of improvement (1.6% per year on average since 2015) falls short of the 3.2%...read more...