Technical Summary

Abstract

All societies requir e energy services to meet basic human needs (e.g., lighting, cooking, space comfort, mobility, communication) and to serve productive processes. For development to be sustainable, delivery of energy services needs to be secure and have low environmental impacts. Sustainable social and economic development requires assured and affordable access to the energy resources necessary to provide essential and sustainable energy services. This may mean the application of different strategies at different stages of economic development. To be environmentally benign, energy services must be provided with low environmental impacts and low greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) reported that fossil fuels provided 85%1 of the total primary energy in 2004, which is the same value as in 2008. Furthermore, the combustion of fossil fuels accounted for 56.6% of all anthropogenic GHG emissions (CO2eq)2 in 2004. [1.1.1, 9.2.1, 9.3.2, 9.6, 11.3]