Sustainable Development

"Meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" - Brundtlant Commission

The field of sustainable development can be conceptually broken into three constituent parts: environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and social-political sustainability.

Since the advent of the industrial revolution, the worldwide energy consumption has been growing steadily. It was coal that fueled this revolution in the 18th and 19th century and with the advent of the automobile, airplanes and the spreading use of electricity, oil became the dominant fuel during the twentieth century. The twentieth century saw a rapid twentyfold increase in the use of fossil fuels and between 1980 and 2004, the worldwide annual growth rate was 2%. The growth of oil as the largest fossil fuel was further enabled by steadily dropping prices from 1920 until 1973. After the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 there was a shift away from oil with coal and nuclear becoming the fuels of choice for electricity generation. Over the last forty years, the use of fossil fuels has continued to grow and their share of the energy supply has increased. In the last three years, coal, which is one of the dirtiest sources of energy, has become the fastest growing fossil fuel.

In 2004, renewable energy supplied around 7% of the world's energy consumption. The renewables sector has been growing significantly since the last years of the 20th century, and in 2005 the total new investment was estimated to have been 38 billion US dollars. Germany and China lead with investments of about 7 billion US dollars each, followed by the United States, Spain, Japan, and India. This resulted in an additional 35 GW of capacity during that time.

Political considerations over the security of supplies, environmental concerns related to global warming and sustainability will continue to move the world's energy consumption away from fossil fuels. The concept of peak oil shows that we have used about half of the available petroleum resources, and predicts a decrease of production. As a result Governments are now applying economic pressure through carbon emissions trading and green taxation and some countries are taking action as a result of the Kyoto Protocol, and further steps in this direction are proposed. For example, the European Commission has proposed that the energy policy of the European Union should set a binding target of increasing the level of renewable energy in the EU's overall mix from less than 7% today to 20% by 2020.

BACK TO TOP