By Muhammad Mudassar ISLAMABAD, April 18 (INP-WealthPK): Energy is an engine of transformative socioeconomic opportunities that touches on every aspect of sustainable development, and the ability to get energy is a fundamental enabler to achieving food security and zero hunger. Food consumption is negatively affected by a lack of fuel, which prevents people from being able to properly cook food or disinfect water by boiling. High prices or scarcity of energy have forced many households struggling with the lack of fuel to resort to strategies that have adverse effects on nutrition, such as bartering food rations for fuel and skipping or undercooking meals. Energy is not only used for cooking food, but also for transportation, preservation, and production of food. Pakistan is heavily reliant on fossil fuels to run transport, generate electricity and extract water for agriculture. However, burning fossil fuels emits different types of dangerous gases like carbon monoxide and greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide that hit agriculture production drastically. These harmful gases cause global warming, which leads to changing weather patterns and droughts that hit the agriculture production hard. Food security is being threatened on numerous fronts, with growing conflicts, extreme weather events due to global warming phenomenon, and the economic and health issues posed by the Covid-19 pandemic all contributing to hunger. Food insecurity is not just about a scarcity of food in the market. It also indicates a lack of sufficient funds to acquire food, let alone nutritious and wholesome foods. As a result of rapid population growth and urbanisation, food security has become an increasingly problematic issue. Pakistan ranked 92nd out of 116 nations in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) in 2021. With a score of 24.7, the country’s level of hunger is categorised as serious. On the regional level, Pakistan is better positioned as compared to India (ranked 101), while the other two close regional neighbours ­— Bangladesh and Sri Lanka — outshine Pakistan by grabbing ranks of 76 and 65, respectively. The government had announced the National Food Security Policy 2018 with the core objectives of poverty alleviation, making agriculture more productive, profitable and climate-resilient. Sustainable energy solutions can reduce costs and improve services for people, as they have to spend a considerable share of income or time meeting their energy needs through collecting or purchasing fuel wood, charcoal, kerosene and diesel. Sustainable agricultural practices and reforestation efforts improve the health of local ecosystems and increase the availability of fuel wood, improving the resilience of communities against the risks of climate shocks or conflict.