Chapter 14: Regional Development and Cooperation
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14.1 Introduction
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14.1.3 Sustainable development and mitigation capacity at the regional level
Sustainable development refers to the aspirations of regions to attain a high level of well-being without compromising the opportunities of future generations. Climate change relates to sustainable development because there might be tradeoffs between development aspirations and mitigation. Moreover, limited economic resources, low levels of technology, poor information and skills, poor infrastructure, unstable or weak institutions, and inequitable empowerment and access to resources compromise the capacity to mitigate climate change. They will also pose greater challenges to adapt to climate change and lead to higher vulnerability (IPCC, 2001).
Figure 14.1 shows that regions differ greatly in development outcomes such as education, human development, unemployment, and poverty. In particular, those regions with the lowest level of per capita emissions also tend to have the worst human development outcomes. Generally, levels of adult education (Figure 14.1b), life expectancy (Figure 14.1c), poverty, and the Human Development Index (Figure 14.1d) are particularly low in SSA, and also in LDCs in general. Unemployment (Figure 14.1a) is high in SSA, MNA, and EIT, also in LDCs, making employment-intensive economic growth a high priority there (Fankhauser et al., 2008).
The regions with the poorest average development indicators also tend to have the largest disparities in human development dimensions (Grimm et al., 2008; Harttgen and Klasen, 2011). In terms of income, LAM faces particularly high levels of inequality (Figure 14.1f). Gender gaps in education, health, and employment are particularly large in SAS and MNA, with large educational gender gaps also persisting in SSA. Such inequalities will raise distributional questions regarding costs and benefits of mitigation policies.
When thinking about inter-generational inequality (Figure 14.2b), adjusted net savings (i.e., gross domestic savings minus depreciation of physical and natural assets plus investments in education and minus damage associated with CO2 emissions) is one way to measure whether societies transfer enough resources to next generations. As shown in Figure 14.2b, there is great variation in these savings rates.
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14.3.2.1 Energy as a driver of regional emissions
About 1.2–1.5 billion people—about 20% of the global population—lacked access to electricity in 2010 (IEA, 2010a, 2012b; World Bank, 2012; Pachauri et al., 2012, 2013; Sovacool et al., 2012; Sustainable Energy for All, 2013) and nearly 2.5–3.0 billion—about 40% of the global population—lack access to modern cooking energy options (Zerriffi, 2011; IEA, 2012b; Pachauri et al., 2012; Sovacool et al., 2012; Rehman et al., 2012; Sustainable Energy for All, 2013). There is considerable regional variation as shown in Table 14.1, with electricity access being particularly low in SSA, followed by SAS.
The lack of access to electricity is much more severe in rural areas of LDCs (85%) and SSA (79%) (IEA, 2010b; Kaygusuz, 2012). In developing countries, 41% of the rural population does not have electricity access, compared to 10% of the urban population (UNDP, 2009). This low access to electricity is compounded by the fact that people rely on highly polluting and unhealthy traditional solid fuels for household cooking and heating, which results in indoor air pollution and up to 3.5 million premature deaths in 2010—mostly women and children; another half-million premature deaths are attributed to household cooking fuel’s contribution to outdoor air pollution (Sathaye et al., 2011; Agbemabiese et al., 2012) (Lim et al., 2012); see Section 9.7.3.1 and WGII Section 11.9.1.3). Issues that hinder access to energy include effective institutions (Sovacool, 2012b), good business models (e.g., ownership of energy service delivery organizations and finance; Zerriffi, 2011), transparent governance (e.g., institutional diversity; Sovacool, 2012a) and appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks (Bazilian et al., 2012b; Sovacool, 2013). Despite these factors, universal access to energy services by 2030 is taking shape (Hailu, 2012).
