This year the Climate Week of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) 2021 took place virtually from May 11 to 14. This event is the preamble to the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2021 (COP26) to be held in Glasgow (United Kingdom) in November.
In the framework of the Climate Week of Latin America and the Caribbean 2021, the Executive Secretary of The Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization (OLACDE), Alfonso Blanco, presented the topic: LAC Strategy for the Energy Transition, during the session Policies for behavior change and technological development.
“The energy transition is not a one-dimensional issue of infrastructure change, it must be supported by a national commitment and must be developed in parallel with actions aimed at increasing the participation of renewable energies in the energy matrix and policies that reduce energy consumption and promote energy efficiency in all consumer sectors”, stated the Executive Secretary, Alfonso Blanco.
Additionally, he mentioned that “the speed of the transition will depend strongly on the factor endowment of the economy in question. Thus, economies rich in capital and with few natural resources of fossil origin will advance faster in their transition than economies with fewer capital resources or those that still possess huge energy resources of fossil origin such as coal, oil or natural gas”.
Part of his intervention was aimed at explaining that energy poverty can be presented through the Human Development Index (HDI), compared with the residential consumption of electricity per capita, to which he mentioned that “it is clear that higher levels of household consumption correspond to a higher level of human development. In Latin America and the Caribbean, around 20 million people lack access to electricity”.
Currently, in the region more than 97% of the population has access to electricity and other modern energies. In clean cooking the number is around 86%.
In his speech, the Executive Secretary of OLACDE also reported that “in September 2019, Colombia led the RELAC regional initiative, the objective of which is to increase the participation of renewable energies in the electricity generation matrix to achieve a goal of 70% by 2030 “.
“The region has more than 25% renewable energy as primary energy, it is the highest percentage in the energy matrix compared to the rest of the world.”
During the Climate Week, the actions that each Latin American country is taking to combat global warming and strategies to be resilient to climate change were discussed. This year the Climate Week had the Government of the Dominican Republic as host.
