■■■■■■■■■■■■ host: welcome to “global 3000”" empty seats -- how brazil's schools are trying to attract students back to class. hot iron -- the steel industry needs to clean up its act. is that even possible? and, low current -- how south africans cope with an erratic energy supply. without electricity, our modern world would grind to a halt. no power means no mobile phones, no internet access, no

fridges, no heating, no cash machines, trains at a standstill, and no petrol either. and crucially, too, it means darkness. according to one study, last year alone, 350 million people worldwide experienced major power outages. why do they happen? poor maintenance of power plants, lack of modernization, or simply too few power plants for the growing demand. on top of this, climate-change-driven extreme weather regularly brings down power lines and pylons. in south africa, power cuts are a frequent occurrence. for years, the state electricity supplier has struggled to meet demand. those with the means to, find a way around. reporter: when it's dark and the power goes out, it's especially hard. 2.5 hours of total darkness in large parts of soweto, because the national energy provider

can't generate enough power. and it happens up to twice a day. for nokuthula dube, it means that her scones won't be ready in time. they need to be baked fresh each day if they're to sell like hotcakes. normally, business is good enough for nokuthula and her daughter to get by. but recent weeks have been tough. the power was switched off daily in their district. a state-mandated energy saving measure, known in south africa as “load shedding.” nokuthula: load shedding is driving us crazy. i have a small business and we're trying to grow, but this is holding us back a lot. sometimes i have things in the oven when they shut off the electricity, and i can't finish baking them. then they all have to be thrown out. reporter:

she's angry at the government. 2.5 hours without electricity means getting her scones to market that much later. and that cuts into her earnings. the whole country is suffering as a result. for the past 15 years, south africa's state-owned electricity provider has had to interrupt supply to certain areas to prevent the power grid from collapsing. however, this winter has been especially hard, and it's affecting all sections of the population. janice scheckter is an entrepreneur who also runs a guesthouse in one of johannesburg's wealthy suburbs. her life is organized around the outages. janice: so, we have a mobile app that shows per suburb where we're going to have load shedding. that we're going to have stage one from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and everyone on the group is going berserk. reporter: in their suburb, the power will be switched off every night this week. at least their stove runs on

gas. janice: so, luckily we can finish making dinner. we could be online for about 1.5 hours. usually we actually sit and chat. yeah, there we go. ok, so -- ok, so, what i need to do is i need to get some lights on for our guests. reporter: janice scheckter turns on the battery-powered lights that were charged during the day and are distributed throughout the house. her husband brings a battery-powered light for the stairs, so no one falls down. this is the darker side of south africa. the country has all the raw materials it needs to produce energy -- mainly domestic coal. it's bad for the environment, but there is enough of it.

there are enough power plants, too. but after years of mismanagement and corruption, they're so poorly maintained that they're failing more and more often. the power has never gone out as often as it has this winter. those who can afford it are making themselves independent from the state power grid. in johannesburg, many are installing solar panels, the ideal solution in a land where the sun shines for nine hours a day, even in winter. eric: it's crazy busy. to explain the demand, people wouldn't understand. we're getting up to 500 phone calls a day. a lot of the people don't want quotes. they just want to tell us, just this many, put solar on, take load shedding away. simple as that. reporter: the power cuts are promoting the use of green energy, but only for those who have enough money. most people here can't afford the roughly 15,000 euro investment. ian:

many years ago, i believe we had an electric stove and we made a conscious decision to move away from electricity. we had a nice ceran top, glass top, and we moved away from the glass top and we went to gas. i would suggest to people out there to look for your alternative sources. look at green energy, look at your solars, and see what's available on the market. reporter: he advises people to have as many different energy sources as possible. that way there's a back-up if one power source fails. but that's too costly for people in the townships. not only do they have to live with the power outages, the constant shutoffs have damaged nokuthula dube's stove. it still heats, but only on the highest setting. nokuthula: i wish the government would listen to us. because it's not just my stove that's broken. my fridge has stopped working too. when the power came back on there was a power surge, and

now i don't have a fridge. reporter: and she just doesn't make enough money with her scones to buy new ones. host: in europe, too, the war in ukraine has led to rising energy costs, and fears of fuel shortages. more than 50% of the energy used in germany's manufacturing sector comes from electricity and gas. the chemical and metal industries are the biggest consumers. but they also offer the greatest potential when it comes to reducing our overall energy consumption and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. reporter: this is the metal that makes the modern world tick. imagine a life without it. no cars, homes, gadgets, electricity. but this wonder material that our lives are built around carries a dirty secret that

nobody's talking about. the steel industry is responsible for a jaw-droppi 8% of the world's greenhouse gas pollution. and, bizarrely, we're actually going to need a lot more of it to clean up our economies. so how can we make steel green? and what's wrong with the industry's favorite solutions? there are two reasons the steel-making process is so dirty. the first is purifying the iron ore needed for steel. by heating iron ore over charcoal fires or mixing it with coking coal in big blast furnaces, you can extract pure iron from rock. that's because oxygen atoms in the iron ore fly off and bind with carbon atoms in the coal. what's left behind is essentially pure iron, known as "reded" iron, and a whole load of co2. the second reason steel sucks is that it takes colossal amounts of energy to power this process. and most of that comes from,

you guessed it, burning coal. wido: today, 72% on a global level are produced via this production route. reporter: this is wido witecka, a steel analyst at german climate think tank agora energiewende. he says we're running out of time. the investment decisions steelmakers make today are crucial because these coal-fired blast furnaces have a lifetime of 15 to 20 years, and after that need to be repaired or retired. wido: the 2020's are a very critical decade in this regd, because more than 70% of the global blast furnace fleet will reach the end of their campaign life and require reinvestment and reinvestment decisions. reporter: so what should steelmakers be doing right now? >> hydrogen. >> hydrogen. >> hydrogen. >> the wonders of hydrogen. reporter: hydrogen is a gas and fuel that can be made cleanly with renewable energy, or much less

cleanly with fossil gas. if y reduce iron ore with hydrogen, oxygen atoms no longer rct with carbon atoms to make co2. instead, they react with hydrogentoms to make h2o. wido: the beauty about this concept is, yes, you need a new production process, but as a byproduct, you have water instead of co2. and this is how we can make the steelmaking process climate neutral. reporter: the second step is then feeding the purified iron into an electric arc furnace. these devices meltown scrap steel or reduced iron with high currents of electricity that turn them into liquid steel. and, ideally, they would be running on electricity made from renewable energy. that's pretty much what swedish steelmaker ssab did last year when it delivered the world's first batch of fossil-free steel to carmaker volvo. europe's steelmakers are betting that hydrogen will be the future of steel. right now, it costs more to make it this way.

but if gas prices stay high and carbon taxesise, switcng away from fossil fuels will become increasingly attractive from a business perspective, too. but of course, using hydrogen alone doesn't make steel green. it's a process with several layers. caitlin: it kind of feels like an onion. reporter: this is caitlin swalec, a steel analyst at the u.s.-based non-profit global energy monitor. caitlin: the first layer is to make sure your electric arc furnace unit is running completely on green energy. but then you need to make sure that the reducing agent in the direct reduced iron plant is hydrogen. but that's not enough. you have to make sure that that hydrogen is actually being produced through an electrolyzer that's operating on 100% green renewable energy. reporter: so, time for hydrogen, right? well, unfortunately, there is a catch. you need a lot of hydrogen. like, really. loads.

making all the steeln the eu out of hydgen wod require about six million tons of the gas. just to satisfy the steel industry's hydrogen needs, you'd need almost as many wind turbines as the eu hasoday. it's not impossible, but it is a logistical nightmare. caitlin: one of the big challenges is where we build these hydrogen production facilities. it needs to happen in places that have that renewable energy capacity. reporter: the problem so far is lots of steelmaking regions don't have that capacity -- or, at least, don't have plans to build it up anytime soon. piping or shipping green hydrogen from elsewhere requires infrastructure to do so. and that means hydrogen can't be the whole solution. but there's a powerful way to simplify the problem that sounds almost too good to be true -- recycling. you might not expect it, but steel is already one of the most recycled materials in the world. more than a quarter of the

steel made today comes from recycled scrap steel that nobody needs. that's basically because the first step of purifying iron ore is expensive. melting down old steel, well, that's much cheaper. wido: we have a rising stock of global steel scrap because whenever a car, whenever a bridge, whenever a building reaches the end of its lifetime, this steel scrap is collected, sorted, and then can be melted in electric arc furnaces to produce new steel. reporter: recycling more steel could massively help in cutting the industry's energy demand. but there are limits. each time you process steel, little impurities like copper and nickel can sneak in and weaken the metal. that means you can't recycle it forever. a third solution is to keep the blast furnaces we're already using, but catch the emissions before they escape into the a third soatmosphere.o keep the that's what advocates of carbon capture are calling for. fossil fuel companies say the principle is simple -- stick a

box on top of a polluting pipe and suck up the co2 that comes out so you can use it in industry or ste it safely underground. the reality is trickier. today, capture rates are often low and costs are high. what's more, the fossil fuel industry has used the promise of carbon capture and storage, or ccs, as an excuse to keep on polluting. but when it comes to decarbonizing heavy industries, analysts do broadly agree ccs has a vital role to play alongside hydrogen. eadbhard: we're way behind in where steel decarbonization actually is going, and this is largely down to complete inaction at the policy level. reporter: this is eadbhard pernot from the clean air task force. it's one of the few environmental organizations calling to put money into capturing carbon. eadbhard: one of the reasons why we don't know answers to questions like capture rates or how would it the inrnational energy agencys bexcts caon capture to cover

half of all steel production by 2050 in a climate-friendly scenario. if it works, it would free up hydrogen to be used in other processes that are also hard to clean. but today, we don't really know what share of emissions ccs can actually capture from steel. if steelmakers stick to blast furnaces but ccs doesn't quickly become cheap or efficient, the coal they burn will just keep on polluting. we can't solve steel by giving up on it. but there's a huge amount policymakers and companies can do to get the tech solutions working. host: access to education, a shared learning environment, and a group of peers -- barely anything is more important for children. but the coronavirus pandemic turned life upside down for around 1.5 billion children worldwide. with schools closed, homeschooling and remote learning became the reality for many. education was already a global

issue even before the pandemic -- 258 million children worldwide had no access to schooling. the pandemic made the situation much worse. for months, 463 million children found themselves out of school. and even in early 2022, millions of children were missing from classrooms. most schools have reopened, including in brazil. but many children are still staying away. reporter: thuanne vitória lima loves to sleuth around. she, wagner, and gabriel have tough cases to solve. together, they're the school detectives on a special mission. >> [speaking portuguese] thuanne: we're detectives because we look for missing students and bring them back.

reporter: when their school in rio de janeiro reopened a year ago, almost half the students didn't return. during the pandemic, home schooling was an illusion, says principal carolina thiele. a lot of students have no smartphone or internet access. they stay away, but schoolmates track them down. carolina: it's good for the children themselves to play a major role. they can motivate their classmates and say, “i'm here, learning. come and join us.” reporter: the school sleuths are inspired by budding detectives from tv shows, and the principal found their outfits in carnival collections. dressing up makes the paperwork more bearable. together, they pour over lists. students who are often absent or fail to hand in assignments will get a phone call, letter, or personal visit. 1000 students, one goal. wagner: kids learn the wrong things on the streets. they should come to school and learn something valuable.

everyone should go to school. reporter: carolina thiele looks out for her students. here, their days are structured, and they receive a meal and moral support. for thuanne, her principal is a role model and confidante. carolina: the children need to change their reality themselves. the school is open and waiting for them. reporter: they are planning to pay a surprise visit today. not far away from the school, carlos eduardo is also looking for missing students. known as kadu, he's one of the few who venture into the favelas in search of them. carlos: this here is a place that's socially invisible. people don't talk about it. there's nothing here. it's a forgotten place. reporter:

his students are older, so instead of studying, many of them work to help support their families. will he find missing students here? anyone who wants to enter this favela needs to know someone like silva. people here work without contracts or future security. and as brazil's social inequality grows, so do the favelas. without education, kadu says it's impossible to get a good job. suddenly, high school dropout gabriel shows up. gabriel: i now salvage air conditioners at the scrapyard. carlos: you dropped out before the pandemic, right? gabriel: right. carlos: gabriel left before the pandemic, but, like so many, we weren't able to reach him. he's one of those who've dropped out. reporter: kadu hopes gabriel will return. and that schools won't have to close again due to covid-19.

carlos: closed schools mean no safe space, no food, no education. reporter: meanwhile, carolina thiele and her student thuanne visit marilene de jesus pacheco. when school reopened, her children didn't show. three missing kids with the same last name. the detectives alerted the principal. carolina: when the students in the area saw me they all shouted, “principal carolina!” then everyone knew i was there. reporter: back then, she popped by in person because marilene didn't realize school had started again, despite all the news in the papers and on social media. that's because marilene is illiterate. marilene: i don't want my children to be like me. i can't read and write. i want them to go to school and have a future. reporter: a lot of students will need

years to catch up. back at the school, the three detectives are handing out documents for the new academic year. after the holidays they'll be moving on to high school. they all plan to keep on studying. thuanne: my dream is to be a teacher and a principal, so i need to work hard. reporter: the trio will have to be replaced by three new detectives, as they've accomplished their mission. by the end of the school year, almost all of the missing students were back in class. host: a dog is a person's best friend. they are certainly one of the world's most popular domesticated animals. estimates suggest around 470 million dogs are kept as pets worldwide. but the picture is not always as rosy as this one. millions of dogs are cast out by their owners every year.

they end up in rescue cents or roam the streets as strays. exact statistics are hard to come by, but animal rights activists suggest as many as 200 million to 500 milon. and the pandemic's made things worse. reporter: paco has got a new sweater, something he could have only wished for when he was still living on the street. but now he has a new owner. luz: it was love at first sight. when i saw him, i thought, he's so beautiful. but he also seemed incredibly old. i'm pretty sure he was abandoned. reporter: paco likely doesn't remember much about his former life. he was probably left on the street by his previous owner at the beginning of the pandemic. luz: he couldn't see out of one eye,

and the vets suggested surgery to remove it. they thought he'd been beaten, very badly. so he underwent an operation. reporter: animal rights activist andrea galindo was the one who found him. during lockdown, rumors circulated that posed a threat to every dog in bogota. andrea: it was horrible. people thought that dogs were spreading covid. people just abandoned them, no matter how long they had had the dogs -- two, five, even seven years. it was just merciless and terribly hard on the animals. they weren't used to surviving on the streets. and suddenly they were alone. reporter: for over two years, volunteers have been working to care for the strays. they collect food and try to

provide veterinary care. but there are just too many dogs. natalia: yes, we receive donations and people help us. there is a lot of solidari. but people have to be able to afford it. there's a lot of social inequality in our country. and that means that we can't take care of all the animals. reporter: some of the dogs are lucky and find a new home, like paco did. the son of paco's owner is really happy about having a new family member. and paco? clearly, he's pretty happy, too. miguel: there are too many stray dogs roaming around. but we can improve their lives. reporter: for animal welfare activist andrea galindo, paco's new life

is validation enough for her work. she has lost count of how many dogs she's helped. and every animal she finds has a place in her heart. andrea: it's hugely gratifying. i always tell myself, that's one animal fewer that's suffering. reporter: but too few strays are as lucky as paco. his new owner says fate led him to her. luz: the pandemic gave us paco. he's a gift. we had no idea how much he'd change our life. i think he was predestined to find us. it just took him three years to find us. this is his home. reporter: there are still over 60,000 stray dogs in bogota, each one

also hoping to find a forever home. host: and that's all from us at “global 3000” this week. do drop us a line to global3000@dw.com, and check out our facebook page, dw global ideas. see you next week.

live from berlin. u.s. lawmakers ordered donald trump to give evidence about the january 6 storming of the u.s. capitol. the former president is required to appear next month into the inquiry and the riot but is not clear whether or not he will comply. also coming up -- managerial warns of a looming hunger crisis. the worst flooding in a decade leaves more than a one million people homeless, with fields