The coronavirus pandemic is reducing energy consumption worldwide because production facilities have been shut down, goods are not being delivered and people are staying at home. However, the current crisis must not distract us from the fact that energy consumption has kept rising before the pandemic. To protect the climate, humanity urgently needs a global transition to renewable energy. The current crisis offers the opportunity to design stimulus programmes worth trillions of euros in a way that drives this change.
This focus section directly relates to the UN’s 7th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG): affordable and clean energy. It also has a bearing on the other SDGs.