UNITED NATIONS, June 20 (Xinhua) -- A UN report published Wednesday said that four in 10 people across the world lacked access to clean cooking fuels and technologies.

"In 2016, 3 billion people (41 percent of the world's population) were still cooking with polluting fuel and stove combinations," said the 2018 Sustainable Development Goals Report launched at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

However, the report noted that ensuring access to affordable, reliable and modern energy for all "has come one step closer due to recent progress in electrification, particularly in the least developed countries (LDCs), and improvements in industrial energy efficiency."

From 2000 to 2016, the proportion of the global population with access to electricity increased from 78 percent to 87 percent, with the absolute number of people living without electricity dipping to just below 1 billion.

"In the least developed countries, the proportion of the people with access to electricity more than doubled between 2000 and 2016," the report said.

Global energy intensity decreased by 2.8 percent from 2014 to 2015, double the rate of improvement seen between 1990 and 2010, according to the report.

However, national priorities and policy ambitions still needed to be strengthened to put the world on track to meet the energy targets for 2030, the report said.