The Nexus between Energy and Development

New research initiated in these areas by Narasimha Rao, Shonali Pachauri, and Yu Nagai is now helping to quantify the effect of energy access on the different dimensions of human development and is leading to the development of a new energy-centered approach to climate equity.

A successful example of ENE’s energy and development research in 2012 are the set of regional workshops that it carried out in Africa, Asia, and the Caspian region as part of a project for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The purpose of the workshops was to disseminate findings on regional energy access and transition scenarios and to demonstrate the two policy tools ENACT and ENE-MCA that were developed by ENE scientists in 2011.

How to use the ENACT and ENE-MCE tools to calculate aspects of energy demand and costs was demonstrated to local officials at workshops in Africa, Asia, and the Caspian area in 2012. The two tools were newly developed in 2011.

The workshops brought together local government officials, policymakers, academics, and other experts. The agenda included presentations by both ENE scientists and regional experts. The presentations highlighted the importance of and complementarity between the regional and global scale analysis carried out by ENE and the more local, context-specific research and studies being carried out at the national level. The workshops served both to inform and to build capacity in the respective regions.

Research within this domain resulted in over a dozen publications by ENE scientists in 2012. Examples include two papers in Energy Policy and the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, building on the work of two former YSSPs, who collaborated with ENE scientists in the summer of 2011. Both papers presented developments and refinements to IIASA’s MESSAGE-Access model, which is a state-of-the-art tool in the research community for analyzing future scenarios for improving access to modern energy in developing regions. Findings from the research on energy access were presented in a number of international meetings, including as a keynote talk and in the plenary sessions of the International Energy Workshop (IEW) in Cape Town (June 2012) and at the annual European conference of the International Association for Energy Economics in Venice (September 2012).

Last edited: 30 October 2013