Emission abatement: advance is visible but still insufficient, says IEA

The new IEA study on sustainable technologies shows clear positive signs and concrete results. Nevertheless, it warns that development is still fragile and fragmented and more efficient policies are required

The road towards an energy revolution based on low carbon emissions is still long and full of obstacles. Nevertheless, early signs of such a revolution are already visible and tangible.

The latter was emphasized by the International Energy Agency (IEA), which in its latest Energy Technology Perspectives 2010 points out that global investment in renewable electricity generation reached $112 billion in 2008. This amount remained essentially unchanged during 2009, despite the serious economic downturn.

After several years of limited growth, energy efficiency is growing significantly in OECD countries, at a rate of almost 2% per year, more than doubling the average of the ‘90s. Moreover, the last 5 years have shown that funding in research, development and testing of low-carbon technologies has undergone a reversed trend compared to the halt or backward tendency that began in the ‘80s.

According to IEA, all this shows that the right path to limit damages causes by climate change has finally been found.

Nevertheless - said Nobuo Tanaka, IEA executive director - current developments are still fragile and fragmented and «the overall evolution of sustainable technologies is still too slow to efficiently tackle the Earth’s global warming. Otherwise, the historical link between carbon emissions and economic production will not be broken».

(July 2010)