Electric vehicles: Do environmental benefits outweigh the challenges? | Experts’ Opinions

DevelopmentAid: What have been the main benefits and challenges of the global transition to electric vehicles?

“Benefits.

The scale is undeniable. The electric car market exceeded 20 million new units sold just in 2025, growing 20% from 2024, with the sales share of electric cars reaching 25% of the overall car market. The environmental gain is already measurable: the global EV fleet displaced around 0.9 million barrels of oil per day in 2023, and this figure reached 1.2 million barrels per day by 2025. EVs are also cleaner in operation — according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), EVs in Europe pay off their carbon debt after about 18,000 km (11,000 miles). Running costs are another clear win: electric cars generally have lower running costs than internal combustion engine vehicles, mainly due to their higher efficiency.

Challenges.

• Battery capacity and energy density. Current battery technology limits range, increases weight, and makes EVs expensive. New power-electronics materials, battery cell technologies and battery pack architectures are enabling charging systems that are more efficient and higher voltage — the first 1,000-volt models came out in 2025, with announcements of charging times under 10 minutes continuing into 2026. This is progress, but true high-density, long-life batteries at low cost remain elusive.
• Electricity production is the key variable. This is the central paradox of EV adoption. The environmental performance of electric vehicles largely depends on the electricity mix used during their use phase — the sensitivity analysis shows that battery service life and vehicle mileage are the most critical factors influencing global warming potential. For example, in developing economies like India, powering batteries contributes to environmental degradation because as of 2021 India sourced 61% of its power from thermal sources including coal. Brazil, by contrast, consistently exhibits the lowest lifecycle global warming impact among developing countries, mainly due to its high reliance on hydropower. An EV is only as clean as the grid it charges from.

Beyond these two challenges, there are structural challenges: charging infrastructure remains a key challenge — while over 4 million public charging points were installed in 2024 (a 40% increase), only 20% of public points offer fast charging, with stark geographic disparity between cities and rural areas. Battery recycling is also inadequate: only 5% of the world’s total batteries are currently recycled, mainly because of the cost and the rather long process involved.”

“The transition to electric vehicles (EVs) is one of the fastest technological shifts in recent transport history. According to the IEA, EVs accounted for roughly 25% of global car sales in 2025, with sales surging 20% to reach 20.7 million vehicles. This growth brings real benefits: lower emissions, reduced oil dependence, and falling running costs. However, these gains come with unresolved challenges, including the costs of mineral extraction, gaps in battery recycling, and prices still out of reach for many households. Charging infrastructure adds further difficulty, since EVs are only as useful as the network powering them, and that network remains incomplete worldwide.”

“The global EV transition has delivered real benefits — reduced urban air pollution, lower lifecycle emissions, and energy diversification — but it has also exposed structural vulnerabilities. The environmental case is strong: EVs displace over 1.2 million barrels of oil per day globally. Yet the picture is not without blemishes. Mining cobalt, lithium, and manganese for batteries raises serious concerns about environmental degradation and community displacement — particularly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where I witnessed firsthand how extractive booms rarely translate to local development without robust governance. Battery recycling infrastructure remains nascent globally. Affordability is a persistent barrier outside China and Europe, and charging networks remain concentrated in high-income economies. The speed of this transition is extraordinary — one in four cars sold globally in 2025 was electric — but the costs and benefits are far from equitably distributed.”

“The shift to electric vehicles around the world has brought real advantages, like big drops in tailpipe emissions and cleaner air in the cities, much better energy efficiency than traditional internal combustion engines, cheaper day-to-day running costs, and less dependence on imported oil. At the same time, the technology faced serious hurdles—high sticker prices, patchy charging networks that create range worries, reliability complaints, heavy environmental costs from mining and making batteries, grid strains, and job losses in older car and oil industries. Subsidies have helped but often warped the market. The IEA (International Energy Agency) points to extra risks such as new tariffs that could push up battery prices, heavy reliance on China for supply chains, possible subsidy cuts if economies slow, and low oil prices that might make EVs less attractive on running costs. Overcapacity and volatile mineral prices add further pressure, especially for trucks and buses.”

DevelopmentAid: To what extent has the environmental, economic, and social impact of the transition to EVs been measured?

“On the environmental side, life cycle assessment (LCA) is the main tool, but it has significant gaps. A 2021 study found that 46% of the carbon emissions associated with the EV sector come from the production process — compared to only 26% for internal combustion engine vehicles. According to the study, producing one tone of lithium requires approximately 2 million liters of water. Geographically, around two-thirds of total global emissions associated with battery production are concentrated in just three countries: China (45%), Indonesia (13%), and Australia (9%). These upstream supply chain impacts are systematically underreported in headline emissions figures. On the economic side, the IEA tracks oil displacement and investment flows well. Worldwide, reported investment announcements from 2022 and 2023 alone exceeded US$275 billion for EVs and US$195 billion in batteries. However, the distributional economic effects — who gains and who loses jobs in the fossil fuel and manufacturing sectors — are much harder to measure and are less consistently tracked across countries. On the social side, measurement is the weakest. Labor and human rights conditions in critical mineral mining, battery production workers’ safety, and the equity of EV affordability across income groups are areas where data is sparse or contested.”

“Measuring the transition’s impact remains difficult across all dimensions. Environmental benefits depend on how electricity is generated, and lifecycle studies on mining and production are incomplete. Economic effects vary between manufacturing hubs, which capture jobs, and importing nations, which absorb costs. Social outcomes, like job shifts and retraining needs, are still unfolding and only partially documented.”

 

 

“Measurement of the EV transition’s full impact remains incomplete and uneven. Carbon lifecycle analyses have grown more sophisticated, but they rely heavily on assumptions about grid electricity mixes — an EV charged on coal is very different from one charged on hydro. Economic impact assessments tend to focus on OECD markets, leaving gaps in understanding how the shift reshapes labour markets, fiscal revenues, and trade balances in developing economies. Social impact tracking — on mining communities, informal transport workers, or displaced auto assembly workers — lags furthest behind. The IEA’s Global EV Outlook provides the best aggregate picture, but granular, country-level data on employment, affordability, and energy access impacts remains sparse, especially across Sub-Saharan Africa. Better-integrated monitoring frameworks, tied to national development plans, are urgently needed.”

“Researchers have looked at the impacts quite thoroughly using lifecycle assessments, ownership cost studies, economic modelling, and checks against the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Overall, they point to net wins for the environment and health when electricity is cleaner, plus decent long-term savings, though factory stages bring drawbacks and benefits aren’t shared equally—subsidies tend to go to wealthier buyers, and issues like child labour in cobalt mines show up in social reviews. Real-world checks, such as ICCT (International Council on Clean Transportation) work on plug-in hybrids, often find CO₂ emissions far higher than lab figures.”

DevelopmentAid: What opportunities and challenges does the shift to electric mobility create for developing countries?

“In emerging markets, the availability of lower-cost Chinese EVs has helped fuel adoption — EV sales jumped more than 60% in 2024 to around 600,000 units, and Brazil more than doubled its EV sales to 125,000, reaching a 6% market share. Countries with clean electricity grids (hydro, geothermal, solar) can immediately achieve very low lifecycle emissions. Countries that hold critical minerals — lithium, cobalt, nickel — have a potential economic opportunity to move up the value chain into battery manufacturing. Challenges. The core tension is that nations with a significant climate impact from EV use (such as South Africa, Indonesia, and Malaysia) should implement or strengthen renewable energy policies — but many developing countries cannot afford rapid grid decarbonization simultaneously with EV rollout. Infrastructure is also a major barrier: globally, public charging capacity for light-duty EVs would need to grow by almost ninefold by 2030 to support EV sales implied by stated policies, and most of that investment will be concentrated in wealthy markets. Battery recycling governance is particularly underdeveloped: many countries remain at an early stage of EV adoption and lack dedicated systems for battery collection, reuse, and recycling — as EV markets expand, these regions face a strategic choice: proactively embed circular economy principles into emerging EV policies, or risk future regulatory gaps and dependence on external recycling systems. Finally, there is a dependency risk: across all emerging economies outside of China, Chinese imports made up 75% of the increase in electric car sales in 2024, meaning many developing countries are becoming consumers of EV technology rather than producers — potentially reinforcing rather than reversing their technological dependency.”

“For developing countries, electric mobility offers a chance to leapfrog fossil-fuel dependence, but EVs require infrastructure to charge, and countries like Albania currently have little such infrastructure. Even where networks exist, remote areas everywhere struggle to justify charging stations, risking deeper inequality between connected cities and underserved regions.”

 

 

“For developing countries, the EV transition is simultaneously an opportunity and a risk — and the difference comes down to positioning. The opportunity is real: Chinese manufacturers, who now account for nearly 75% of global EV production, are actively targeting Africa and Asia with increasingly affordable models. BYD’s market share in Africa surged from just 4% in 2023 to 35% by 2025 — a dramatic illustration of how quickly the landscape is shifting away from traditional Western and Japanese brands. This opens genuine inroads for South-South trade – I have seen great opportunities in my work with H.T. Barma Ltd. to source electric vehicles and new energy solutions from Chinese manufacturers for East African buyers. The challenges are formidable. Charging infrastructure remains sparse and fragmented, with few common standards across African markets — making interoperability a critical unsolved problem. Regulatory frameworks differ country by country, creating friction for importers and fleet operators. Financing is scarce and expensive where available: most African buyers cannot access the structured leasing and credit facilities that make EVs viable in developed markets. Intermediaries who can navigate China’s supply chain — providing factory-floor visibility, independent quality assurance, and relationship continuity across language and cultural divides — play a critical gap-filling role. When a Kenyan transport company is sourcing electric trucks from a Chinese factory, the difference between a smooth transaction and a costly dispute often comes down to having trusted eyes on the ground at every stage of production and delivery.”

“In developing countries, the picture is mixed. There’s scope for two- and three-wheelers and busy bus fleets to cut fuel bills and improve air quality, but problems usually win out—unreliable power grids that overload easily, steep costs with little financing, weak infrastructure, reliance on imports, and risks of upsetting informal transport or raising emissions where power is still dirty. The World Bank notes these strains hit harder because of underinvestment and calls for smarter charging and joined-up planning.”

 

See also: Can the Sustainable Development Goals still be achieved by 2030? | Experts’ Opinions

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