Rank every country by the share of its energy that comes from renewable sources and the result looks like a mistake. The top of the table is not Denmark or Germany. It is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and the Central African Republic.

Across 200 countries, renewable energy share and GDP per capita correlate at −0.24. The relationship is negative: on this measure, richer countries are less renewable, not more.

The statistic is accurate. The intuition it triggers is wrong.

The top of the table

• DR Congo — 96.3% renewable, GDP per capita $649
• Somalia — 95.4% renewable, $630
• Liberia — 92.8% renewable, $852
• Central African Republic — 90.9% renewable, $516
• Madagascar — 83.1% renewable, $545
• Burundi — 83.0% renewable, $219

Burundi has the lowest GDP per capita in the entire dataset and one of the highest renewable shares in the world.

What is actually being counted

The World Bank indicator is renewable energy consumption as a share of total final energy consumption. "Renewable" here includes traditional biomass: firewood, charcoal, crop residue and animal dung burned for cooking and heating.

That is the whole explanation. DR Congo's 96% is not hydroelectricity and solar farms. It is a population that cooks over wood and charcoal because it has no alternative. Roughly 2 billion people worldwide still cook this way, and it is one of the largest causes of indoor air pollution and premature death on the planet.

So a very high score on this indicator usually signals energy poverty, not an energy transition. The two look identical in the ratio and are opposites in every way that matters.

This is also why the relationship is negative rather than absent: as countries industrialise, they substitute fossil fuels for biomass, and the renewable share falls even as total clean-energy capacity rises.

The bottom of the table

• Kuwait — 0.1% renewable, GDP per capita $32,718
• Turkmenistan — 0.1% renewable (lowest in the dataset)
• Hong Kong SAR — 0.4% renewable, $54,075
• Bermuda — 0.9% renewable, $142,855
• United Arab Emirates — 1.0% renewable, $50,274
• Singapore — 1.1% renewable, $90,674

Two very different situations are mixed together here. Kuwait, Turkmenistan and the UAE are hydrocarbon producers burning what they extract. Singapore, Hong Kong and Bermuda are dense city-states and islands with essentially no land for wind, hydro or utility-scale solar — Singapore's constraint is physical geography, not policy.

The global average sits at 29.9%.

How to read it properly

If you want to know whether a country is decarbonising, this indicator will mislead you. Better questions:

**Renewable share of electricity, not total energy.** Electricity is where the transition is actually happening, and it excludes cooking fuel.

Modern renewables only — hydro, wind, solar, geothermal — with traditional biomass stripped out. Several agencies publish this separately, and it inverts most of the ranking above.

Emissions per capita. The outcome variable everyone actually cares about, and the one that makes Bermuda and Kuwait look very different from each other despite adjacent renewable shares.

Access to clean cooking fuel. The mirror image of the biomass problem, and arguably the more urgent number.

Note also that this snapshot is from 2022, older than most of the atlas. Solar and wind capacity has grown substantially since, so current figures for the middle of the table will have moved.

The general lesson

This is the clearest example in the whole atlas of a statistic that is technically correct and directionally misleading. The number is real, the sourcing is solid, and reading the top of the table as "greenest countries" gets the world exactly backwards.

Whenever a development indicator is expressed as a share, ask what happens to the denominator when a country gets richer. Often that, not the thing being measured, is what the ranking is really tracking. The same trap appears in health spending as a share of GDP.

Explore the full maps for renewable energy use and GDP per capita, or try the daily map game. Sources: World Bank Open Data, 2022 and 2024.