Friday, August 05, 2011

CLIMATE CHANGE & ENERGY

CLIMATE CHANGE & ENERGY

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

‘Smoke stack’ industries have to a great extent factored into the climate change patterns, with dire consequences of more erratic weather patterns that we experience today. ‘Smoke stack’ industries—those utilizing ‘hot process’ technologies—have for so long employed fossil fuels as energy sources, thus compounding the pollution arising from the manufacturing sector.

The tall order is for manufacturing to eventually shift to ‘cold process’ technologies and the utilization of renewable energy or RE sources. Scale wise, the days of very large-scale, energy-intensive production, e.g. plant churning out over a million tons per annum of steel, should be scaled down to more manageable levels, which hopefully will utilize RE.

A long-term total shift to RE must be envisioned and put into action, with the additional consequence of reversing the climate change patterns of the day. It isn’t too late yet for such a reversal job to undertake, so let’s see what is in store in the UNIDO that resonates with the overall vision.

[Philippines, 14 July 2011]

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Energy and Climate change

Issue

Energy is closely linked with key contemporary global challenges the world faces – social development and poverty alleviation, environmental degradation and climate change and food security – and is therefore a defining issue of our time. Industry needs reliable and affordable energy. At the same time, there has to be an appropriate balance between growing demand for energy and the urgent need to protect environment and climate.

Objective

UNIDO seeks to tackle these challenges. Indeed, climate change and energy policies are inextricably linked – two thirds of our emissions come from the energy we use. Decisions in one field cannot be made without considering the impacts in the other. Thus, UNIDO's Energy Strategy aims at helping developing countries and countries in transition to achieve the following objectives:

Increase the competitiveness of their industries by reducing industrial energy intensity

Reduce their impact on climate change by decreasing the carbon emissions of their industries and by promoting renewable energy technologies

Increase the viability of their enterprises, particularly in rural areas, by augmenting the use of renewable energy sources

Activities

The responsibility of UNIDO is to promote access to energy for productive uses while at the same time supporting patterns of energy use by industry that mitigate climate change and are otherwise environmentally sustainable. More broadly, UNIDO's services can be categorized as follows: