Target 7.1: By 2030, ensure universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services.

Approximately 1 billion people still have no access to electricity, 50% of which live in sub- Saharan Africa. Access to energy is essential for achieving many sustainable development goals, from poverty reduction, improved health care, gender equity, and education to combating climate change. Energy accounts for around 60% of total global greenhouse gas emissions and while energy sources are transitioning from coal, to natural gas, to renewables, global energy use is still primarily based on fossil fuels. In this context, Target 7.1 can be achieved and monitored with the integration of EO data. Applicable on a larger scale, remote sensing data is able to give information that by field surveys alone would be more time consuming and often difficult to gain because of the accessibility of many locations. The regular collection of EO ensures the long-term availability of data to monitor the status of remote and rural settlements. A useful data source is nigh-time luminosity data, which can collect daily variations at sufficiently low light levels to detect artificial lights at night across remote and rural areas. Night time lights products have been used for a vast range of purposes for more than 50 years, including to map the distribution of economic activity, poverty levels and to generate CO2 emission maps. In particular, the NASA’s Black Marble product suite can be used to monitor in near-real time areas not reached by centralized electricity services, and then inform the development of investment and implementation plans for electrical infrastructures aiming to protect and/or increase energy access by the highest number of people in a country.

EO-based technologies for monitoring access to different types of energy resources varies depending on the details of the information needed. For instance, the type of energy source (e.g. solar panels, diesel power generators, nationwide electrical networks) can only be acquired using high resolution EO data in combination with sophisticated statistical techniques, but various use cases (e.g., from Zambia to Pakistan) show the high potential that EO have to monitor several aspects of this target.

(eo services based on Access to energy (status of settlements). Indicator 7.1.1: Access to electricity)