Page - (000188) - in Evaluating Climate Change Action for Sustainable Development

10.1 Introduction Globally, the International EnergyAgency (IEA) estimates that 1.3 billion people still livewithout access to electricity and that 2.6billonare still reliant onbiomass forcooking.1There isastaggeringinequality inaccess toservicesandinthequality ofservicesbetweenrichandpoorsocieties–thepoorer threequartersof theworld’s population use only 10%of global energy.2 Lack of access tominimum levels of basic services is a serious barrier to socio-economic development and progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).3 While imperative, cost- effectiveexpansionofminimumservices throughout thedevelopingworld is likely to carrywith it a significant increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In the casesof thedevelopmentof infrastructures, institutionsandculturalpracticesbased on carbon intensive development, the achievement of theSDGcould comewith a “carbon lock-in” inhibiting a future switch towards low-carbon technologies.4 Therefore the integration of the expansion of basic services into the climate change evaluations is crucial. The latent demand for basic services that is “suppressed” due to barriers such as low income, weak infrastructure and inade- quate access to technology have to be measured and accounted in the decision makingprocess.Puremitigation instruments thatonly focuson reducingemissions and not on avoiding emissions are therefore likely to haveminimal impact in the long-termfordevelopingcountriesandofferno incentives foralternative“cleaner” development pathways to the poorest. InmanyLeastDevelopedCountries (LDC), the low level of historic emissions means that there is littleCO2emissions to reduce, rendering thegains fromresult- based financemechanisms like the CleanDevelopmentMechanism (CDM)mar- ginal or negligible. To foster the achievement of the sustainable development objectives of the CDM, the concept of “suppressed demand” has been integrated in some of themethodologies allowing to account for minimum services for the baselineGHGemission levels. In this case, insteadof thehistorical emissions, the baseline scenariowould account for theGHGemissions if theminimum level for basic services such as energy access, cleanwater or sanitationwas reached. The baseline emissions may be calculated using the baseline technologies in a case where the barrier to meet the minimum level is the cost of operation of the technology like fuel consumption, or new technologies corresponding to themin- imumlevelofservices incontextswhere theservice isavailable.Thedetermination 1WEO,Would Energy Outlook 2012 (Paris, France: International Energy Agency, n.d.), http:// www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/WEO2012_free.pdf. 2Summary conclusions of theViennaEnergyForum, June2011 3UnitedNations, “ResolutionAdopted by theGeneral Assembly on 25 September 2015 – 70/1. TransformingOurWorld:The2030AgendaforSustainableDevelopment.,”2015,http://www.un. org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol¼A/RES/70/1&Lang¼E. 4GregoryC.UnruhandJavierCarrillo-Hermosilla, “GlobalizingCarbonLock-In,”EnergyPolicy 34, no. 10 (July 2006): 1185–97, doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2004.10.013. 172 Y.Franc¸ois andM.Gavald~ao