Paper/Proposal Title
Development, Energy, and Climate Change Policy: Enabling Sustainable Development through Access to Energy
Start Date
11-9-2017 10:30 AM
Keywords
sustainable development, energy access, climate change
Abstract
Human rights, human development, and climate change clearly overlap in many ways. Development, as quantified by the Human Development Index (HDI), for example, has historically been strongly correlated with energy consumption. This fact is recognized in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7, to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.” Currently the world is in the midst of a large wave of human migration, much of it involuntary and due to stymied development opportunities as well as political upheaval. Climate change will become, or already is, an exacerbating factor in migration dynamics.
A pertinent question is how to ensure energy access in the context of a changing climate for those peoples who have not enjoyed the benefits of plentiful and cheap fossil fuels, the pathway followed by all industrialized countries. Policies and pathways for mitigating climate change can be investigated using computer models that examine current and future energy systems in many regions around the world. Although stylized in many ways through simplified economic representations and climate modules, these models very uniformly project that, undertaken judiciously, climate protection can be relatively inexpensive on a global scale.
Looking more closely at the regional projections of these models, however, one often finds somewhat unrealistic assumptions as to how countries can supposedly develop while having access to only very small amounts of energy compared to what has been the historical norm. This paper shows some of these results. The key question is whether low-energy development pathways are feasible or if we will have to think harder about the effort needed to enable access to sustainable energy for developing countries.
Included in
Development, Energy, and Climate Change Policy: Enabling Sustainable Development through Access to Energy
Human rights, human development, and climate change clearly overlap in many ways. Development, as quantified by the Human Development Index (HDI), for example, has historically been strongly correlated with energy consumption. This fact is recognized in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7, to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.” Currently the world is in the midst of a large wave of human migration, much of it involuntary and due to stymied development opportunities as well as political upheaval. Climate change will become, or already is, an exacerbating factor in migration dynamics.
A pertinent question is how to ensure energy access in the context of a changing climate for those peoples who have not enjoyed the benefits of plentiful and cheap fossil fuels, the pathway followed by all industrialized countries. Policies and pathways for mitigating climate change can be investigated using computer models that examine current and future energy systems in many regions around the world. Although stylized in many ways through simplified economic representations and climate modules, these models very uniformly project that, undertaken judiciously, climate protection can be relatively inexpensive on a global scale.
Looking more closely at the regional projections of these models, however, one often finds somewhat unrealistic assumptions as to how countries can supposedly develop while having access to only very small amounts of energy compared to what has been the historical norm. This paper shows some of these results. The key question is whether low-energy development pathways are feasible or if we will have to think harder about the effort needed to enable access to sustainable energy for developing countries.
