"Energy with business as usual will not lead to achieving the Millennium Development Goals," Susan McDade, a manager for a sustainable energy project of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), said at a press briefing in New York.

Citing two studies by UNDP and the UN Millennium Project, which are due to be released later this year, she stressed that access to modern energy services could have a decisive impact on reducing poverty.

The studies, along with the International Energy Agency's (IEA) newly released "World Energy Outlook 2004," also suggest that meeting the MDGs will demand modern energy services for over half a billion people by 2015.

"These findings underscore the danger of overlooking energy's role in human development," said Ms. McDade, pointing out that almost 1.6 billion people in developing countries live without electricity in their homes.

According to UNDP, nearly one third of the world's population depends on dung, firewood and agricultural residues for cooking and heating. Experts say rural women and their children bare the brunt of this harsh reality.

"Day in and day out, rural women spend hours at a time gathering fuel-wood, inefficiently processing food and inhaling smoke from wood-fired cooking stoves," said Ms. McDade, who said she wondered why the international community had failed to set specific targets for the availability of energy services as part of its efforts to achieve the MDGs.

"For these women and their families, dependence on traditional fuels and fuel technologies barely allows fulfilment of the basic human needs of nutrition, warmth and lighting, let alone the opportunity for more productive activities," she added.

UNDP suggests that scaling up rural energy services can be a far more effective means of fighting poverty than previously thought. A recent study on Mali shows that mechanical power can help increase women's income by an average of 50 per cent and create conditions for better health and education.

The IEA estimates that eradicating extreme poverty by 2015 would imply that more than 700 million people will have to switch from using traditional biomass fuel to more efficient and clean commercial fuels. According to it report, halving the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day would require electricity for an additional 600 million people - mostly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Vijay Modi, a Columbia University professor and author of an upcoming UN Millennium Project study who also addressed the news conference, estimated that achieving the MDGs would require an annual average of $20 billion of investment in the development of energy infrastructure and services.

"Energy services are a missing MDG," he said. "This requires a concerted and decisive international effort."

Video of press conference [41mins]