The energy transition
would continue to disturb food security, and disruptions to agricultural production would lead to food shortages and price increases, which would have global repercussions, damaging the poor significantly (Murray, 2024). Extreme weather events will continue to negatively impact harvests for farmers, as soil erosion, droughts, or heavy rainfalls, will damage crop yields, and subsequently lead to more food scarcity (United states Environmental Protection Agency, 2025). Over the last few decades, the data has supported this claim that growth of crop yields are falling, for example in the Middle East and North Africa, which had 48% growth of crop yields between 1999 and 2009, compared with a 14% growth between 2009 and 2019 (GOV.UK, 2021). This represents a greater volatility in the yield in the last decade than previously seen and, according to the data, climate change is a root cause of this. The situation will only worsen unless net-zero is reached swiftly. What are the renewable energy options? There are several renewable alternatives – including solar power and wind energy – that will lead the way in facilitating a green transition, but technological advancements will be crucial to scale up the capacity of renewables in energy generation, as currently, renewables account for just 30% of global electricity (Frost, 2024). According to the data from the IEA, renewables are the second largest source of global electricity generation, behind oil, coal and gas, which supply nearly 64% of the market. The shares of different fuels in global electricity generation in 2019, can be seen below from Figure 1 (IEA, 2025b).
Hydroelectric power generation accounts for the largest share of renewable power generation, but it had the lowest average growth rate out of all the renewable electricity sources from 1990 to 2020 (IEA, 2025b). Its expansion has been slowing in past years due to factors such as the limited suitable sites for hydro power, and increasing costs (IEA, 2021). The average annual growth rates of solar and wind energy production in OECD countries from 1990 to 2020 was 32.7% and 20.1% respectively, compared to
Figure 1: fuel shares in world electricity generation, 2019
hydro’s average annual growth rate of 0.7%. (IEA, 2025b). Therefore, when looking at a viable transition to a net-zero global economy, it is the likes of wind and solar which are the most scalable and are consequently receiving the most investment.
Renewables will need to replace fossil fuels in transport and industry where machines, vehicles, planes and shipping all rely on fossil fuels, and advancements in electric batteries will be required too, which currently supply 10% of the market for transport (Eurostat, 2025). Agriculture and land use also contribute to global warming, so advances in electric machinery and bio-based products will help to provide an alternative to the fossil-fuel-reliant machinery and methane-releasing animals. Needless to say, fossil fuels will prove to be extremely difficult to replace entirely, especially in a society where its backbone has been built from fossil fuels since the industrial revolution. Therefore, it is vital that the world works together to secure the best future for the planet.
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