The Clean Transition as a Polycrisis Mitigation Strategy

A polycrisis is more than several crises at once. It is crises that share causes and amplify one another. Fossil dependence is a textbook case. When oil and gas prices spike, as in 2022 and again in 2026, importers' trade balances deteriorate, currencies weaken and inflation rises. Governments spend reserves or borrow to subsidise fuel, and fertiliser and food prices climb, so the energy shock becomes a debt, food and social shock. The same fuels pollute the air of the cities that burn them and warm the climate that then delivers floods and droughts.

Because the registers share a root, interventions at the root reduce all three. A solar farm that displaces imported gas cuts the import bill, the air pollution from the gas plant and its emissions. An electric bus fleet that displaces imported diesel does the same, and an electric or LPG cooker that displaces charcoal saves forests and lungs. Few other policies cut energy-security, health and climate risk at the same time. Most trade one against another: subsidising fuel to cushion a price shock, for example, raises consumption, pollution and emissions.

The registers fall unevenly across countries. Net importers, which include most of Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America, bear the security risk and most of the health risk. Exporters, mostly in the Gulf, Central Asia, Russia, parts of Africa and Norway, bear a different risk: that the transition erodes the rents their budgets depend on. The rest of this dashboard measures each register and the progress being made.

For the 105 net fuel-importing countries with data, the median fuel import bill was 4.8% of GDP in 2019 and 4.5% in 2021. It jumped to 7.4% in 2022, eased to 5.8% in 2023 and fell back to 4.8% in 2024 as prices normalised. In dollars, importers spent about $2.7 trillion on fuel in 2023. That money leaves the economy, often borrowed or paid from scarce reserves, and it returns as inflation when prices spike.

The burden is heaviest in lower-middle-income countries, where the median bill was 7.6% of GDP in 2023, against 7.0% in low-income, 5.7% in upper-middle-income and 4.4% in high-income importers. Small open economies and fuel-trading hubs (Singapore, Belgium, the Netherlands, Lithuania) post large gross bills because they re-export refined products. Among developing countries, thirteen spent more than a tenth of GDP on fuel imports in 2023, led by Lebanon (24%), Mauritania (16%), Liberia (15%), Lesotho and the DR Congo (13%), and including Thailand (10%).

For poor importers the fuel bill competes directly with development spending. A lower-middle-income country spending 7–8% of GDP on fuel imports is spending more on oil and gas than many such countries spend on health and education combined. Twenty of the 42 low- and lower-middle-income importers spent 8% of GDP or more on fuel imports in 2023. Each percentage point of GDP not spent on imported fuel is fiscal and foreign-exchange space for development.

The 2022 price shock is a natural test of what protects an economy. Across importers, the jump in the fuel bill between 2021 and 2022 was a median 57% of the 2021 bill, and the size of the jump was closely tied to the size of the existing bill (r = 0.57). Belgium, Lithuania, Lebanon, Moldova and Mauritania saw their bills rise by 10 percentage points of GDP or more in a single year, and Morocco's doubled from 5.9% to 11.4%.

A clean electricity mix did not, by itself, soften the blow. Among importers with data, the jump in the fuel bill was unrelated to the fossil share of total energy (r = −0.07 across 51 importers with data) and to the low-carbon share of electricity (r = −0.08 across 104). That is less paradoxical than it looks. Most of an importer's fuel bill is oil for transport and gas for industry, heating and cooking, which the power sector does not touch. Countries with clean grids but oil-fuelled transport, such as Uruguay or Kenya, remain exposed to oil prices. The protection comes only when clean electricity reaches those uses, through electric vehicles, buses and two-wheelers, heat pumps, electric cooking and industrial electrification, or when efficiency cuts demand.

The 2026 shock repeats the lesson at larger scale. The World Bank's April 2026 Commodity Markets Outlook projects energy prices 24% higher this year after the Hormuz closure. Applied to 2023 import values, that would add about $640 billion to importers' bills, a median 1.4% of GDP. Countries that have electrified road transport and heating are better placed this time. China's electric-vehicle fleet and Pakistan's rooftop solar boom are cases in point. Those still running on imported oil, gas and LPG face a repeat of 2022.

Fossil-fuel combustion caused about 1.1 million deaths from outdoor fine particles in 2017 (1.05 million in the paper's global total; 1.14 million summing the country estimates used here), and 976,000 of these, 86%, were in net fuel-importing countries. China, India, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Türkiye, Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh all import fuel and suffer heavy fossil air pollution. The median fossil-fuel death rate was 7.6 per 100,000 among importers and 5.4 among exporters, whose populations are smaller and often farther from combustion sources. Lelieveld and colleagues, using a different exposure–response model that includes ozone, attribute about 5.1 million deaths a year to fossil-fuel air pollution.

Combining the registers identifies countries that are triply exposed: a fuel import bill of at least 4% of GDP, at least 15 fossil-fuel air-pollution deaths per 100,000 people and a fossil share of energy of at least three-quarters. India, South Africa, Poland, Greece and North Macedonia meet all three thresholds, with 1.56 billion people between them. Many more meet two. For these countries, every gigawatt of domestic clean power and every electric bus pays three dividends.

The health gains also arrive soonest. Fine particles fall within days of a coal plant closing or a bus fleet electrifying, while climate benefits accumulate over decades and security benefits come with the next price spike. In political terms, the health register is often the most persuasive case for a transition whose security and climate payoffs are less visible.

The 160 countries covered here emitted 37.1 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2024, almost all of it from fossil fuels. The fossil share of primary energy remains about 80% in most large economies, from India (90%) and South Africa (95%) to China (80%), Japan (83%) and Germany (76%). Brazil is an exception at 49%, thanks to hydropower and biofuels. Cutting the climate register means displacing fossil energy across all uses, not only in power.

Solar and wind are where the displacement is fastest. Their median share of electricity rose from 0.8% in 2015 to 6.5% in 2024. In high-income countries it reached 17.8% (from 4.8%), led by Denmark (71%), Lithuania (64%), the Netherlands, Uruguay and Germany (45–46%), Greece (43%) and Chile (38%). Among developing countries, the West Bank and Gaza (39%), Namibia (37%), Djibouti (35%), Lebanon (30%), Brazil (28%), Jordan (24%), Morocco, Pakistan, China and Türkiye (22%) and Kenya (21%) stand out. Several of the fastest, Lebanon and Pakistan above all, were driven bottom-up by households and firms escaping fuel-driven tariffs and blackouts. The median low-income country gets 2.9% of its electricity from solar and wind, and the median lower-middle-income country 3.4%.

The deployment gap is the most important risk-management gap in the world economy. The countries most exposed to fuel shocks and air pollution are the slowest to deploy, because capital costs two to three times as much as in rich countries, grids are weak and utilities are indebted. Pakistan shows another path. Households and firms, squeezed by tariffs and outages, imported tens of gigawatts of cheap solar panels within two years, cutting grid demand and fuel imports from the bottom up.

Twenty-seven countries in this dataset are net fuel exporters. For many, fuel dominates the economy. Fuel exports equalled about three-quarters of GDP in the United Arab Emirates and around half in Congo and Kuwait, and 35–46% in Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Oman, Qatar, Iraq, Gabon and Angola. Twenty-one countries, with 545 million people, earned fossil-fuel rents above 10% of GDP in 2021. In Libya, Iraq, Timor-Leste and Congo the figure exceeded a third.

For these countries, a successful global transition threatens public revenue, exchange rates and jobs. They also face price volatility: the same shocks that hurt importers bring windfalls, followed by busts. The risk is greatest where rents are large, institutions weak and savings small. Several of these countries, among them Angola, Congo, Iraq and Gabon, also have high poverty and fragile public finances.

Their mitigation strategy is diversification: sovereign wealth funds that save windfalls, investment in non-fossil sectors including green hydrogen, solar and mineral processing where they have the resources, domestic clean power that frees oil and gas for export, and fiscal reforms that broaden the tax base. Managed early and with international support, the transition can reduce exporters' volatility as well. Managed late, it concentrates stranded-asset risk in some of the world's most fragile states.

The IEA's World Energy Investment 2026 projects $3.4 trillion of energy investment this year, $2.2 trillion of it in grids, storage, renewables, nuclear, efficiency and electrification and about $1.2 trillion in fossil fuels. Oil investment is falling for a third year, below $500 billion. Gas investment, near $330 billion, is at a decade high on liquefied natural gas projects, and coal investment, at $180 billion, is the highest since 2012. The IEA expects the Hormuz crisis to reshape investment priorities for years, toward both domestic clean supply and diversified fossil supply.

The cost case has largely been won. IRENA found that 91% of utility-scale renewable capacity commissioned in 2024 produced power more cheaply than the cheapest new fossil alternative, and that renewables avoided about $467 billion in fossil-fuel costs that year. Meanwhile governments spent about $725 billion on explicit fossil-fuel subsidies in 2024, according to the IMF, much of it to cushion consumers from the very price shocks the transition would reduce.

The remaining barrier is finance in the countries that need the shift most. Capital costs two to three times as much in many emerging and developing economies as in advanced ones, which can make a solar or wind project's power more expensive than in Europe despite better sunshine. De-risking instruments, concessional finance, guarantees and reforms that shift subsidies from fuel consumption to clean supply and protection for the poor are where policy can make the transition a faster shock absorber.

The net-fuel-trade layer divides the world into importers (most of Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America) and exporters (the Gulf, Central Asia, Russia, Norway, Canada, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Colombia and others). The fuel-bill and 2022-shock layers show where importers are most exposed. They are heaviest in Southern and West Africa, parts of South and South-East Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and the small island and landlocked economies.

The health layer shows fossil-fuel air-pollution deaths per 100,000 people, highest across the Balkans and Eastern Europe, China, Türkiye, South Africa, India and Egypt. The CO₂ layer shows emissions per person, highest in the Gulf, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia, North America and Kazakhstan. The solar-and-wind layer shows how far the transition has reached into each power system, and the rents layer shows where the transition itself is a risk.

Hover over or tap a country for its card: its electricity mix as a bar, fuel imports and exports as shares of GDP from 2019 to 2024, the 2022 shock, energy import dependence, fossil air-pollution deaths, CO₂ per person and fossil rents. Selecting a country loads it into the shock-absorber calculator in section 9. The sortable table below lists every country.

Choose a net fuel importer, a fossil-fuel price shock and a share of fossil fuel use displaced by domestic clean energy and efficiency: electric transport, heat pumps, electric cooking, clean power and lower demand. The calculator starts from the country's 2023 fuel import bill in dollars and as a share of GDP. It assumes imports fall in proportion to displaced use and that the shock raises the cost of the remaining imports by the chosen percentage.

It also scales fossil-fuel air-pollution deaths (2017) and CO₂ (2024) in proportion to the displaced share. This simplifies a great deal. Displacing oil in transport and coal in power have different health and import effects, and domestic fossil production cushions some importers. But it shows the core trade-off: each point of fossil use displaced lowers the import bill in normal times, the extra cost in a shock, and the deaths and emissions, all at once.

The default shock is the World Bank's 24% for 2026, and the default displacement is 20%, roughly what a decade of fast electrification of transport and heat, plus clean power, could achieve in many countries. Compare a country with a large bill relative to its economy, such as Morocco, Thailand or Jordan, with China, whose bill is huge in dollars but under 3% of GDP.

The first priority, shown by the 2022 and 2026 shocks, is to electrify the uses that drive fuel imports. Electric buses, two- and three-wheelers and cars cut oil imports and urban air pollution. Heat pumps and electric cooking cut gas and LPG imports, and industrial electrification and efficiency cut both. These are where the security dividend lies, and they compound the health and climate dividends of clean power. Efficiency, from building codes to vehicle standards, is the cheapest shock absorber of all, because the energy not used cannot be cut off.

The second is to build domestic clean supply fast and spread it widely: solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and storage, with grids able to carry them and utilities able to pay for them. Distributed solar, as Pakistan's boom shows, can scale even where utilities are weak. For the transition to protect the countries most exposed, finance must reach them. That means concessional and blended finance, guarantees and currency-risk instruments that bring the cost of capital in emerging economies closer to advanced-economy levels, and reform of fuel subsidies so they protect poor households rather than fossil consumption.

The third is to manage the risks the transition creates. Supply chains for solar panels, batteries and the minerals that go into them are highly concentrated, and diversifying them through recycling, alternative chemistries and processing in more countries is part of energy security. Exporters need support to diversify before rents fall. Workers and regions dependent on coal and oil need a just transition. Handled this way, the clean transition is not one more crisis to manage. It is the most effective way available to reduce several at once.

Coverage: 160 countries with at least one million people. Fuel import bill = fuel imports (% of merchandise imports, TM.VAL.FUEL.ZS.UN) × merchandise imports (current US$) ÷ GDP (current US$), 2019–2024. Fuel exports are calculated the same way. A net importer has fuel imports greater than fuel exports in the latest year (2023, or 2024). The 2022 shock is the 2022 bill minus the 2021 bill, in percentage points of GDP. Energy import dependence is net energy imports as a % of energy use (WDI). Fossil rents are oil, gas and coal rents, % of GDP (WDI, 2021).

Health: fossil-fuel outdoor PM2.5 deaths in 2017 = country attributable deaths × (coal + oil and gas share), from McDuffie et al. (2021). Climate: CO₂ per person and total CO₂ from the Global Carbon Budget, and fossil share of primary energy, low-carbon and solar-plus-wind shares of electricity from the Energy Institute and Ember, all via Our World in Data (latest 2023–2025). Investment, cost and subsidy figures are quoted from the IEA, IRENA, the IMF and the World Bank.

Caveats: trade values include re-exports, which inflate gross bills for trading hubs. The fuel classification includes refined products and some electricity. The 2017 health data predate recent changes. The 2026 scenario and calculator are proportional, illustrative calculations that ignore contracts, hedging, domestic production, exchange rates and demand responses. Correlations are not causal.