Endorsements

Roderick Lawrence
Faculty of Social & Economic Sciences, University of Geneva
Cities have a crucial responsibility in meeting international goals, national objectives and local needs that promote the RIO+ 20 agenda. It is necessary to reconsider the construction of housing and urban development in a broad environmental, economic, social and political context that explicitly accounts for health, environmental justice and equity.

Raymond Leban
France, VP Corporate Strategy, EDF
The climate change issue is now at a crucial point after the huge change that happened in Copenhagen. The “common but differentiated responsibility” concept that has largely driven the process up to now by separating the roles of developed and developing countries, is presently taking a new profile. Emerging countries and a group of other fast growing countries named here “the 3Gs”, although not ready to be constrained by a top down process, are realizing that their growth prospects enable them to green their growth and make a positive contribution to the collective emissions reduction action. The pledges announced two years ago are becoming reality and this reality is a proof of this “new deal”. It seems worth for the international community to recognize such a platform of countries and to strengthen collective efforts for the greening of its members’ growth to occur (through increasing use of cost-effective /energy efficient technologies), given the absolute and relative size of their energy needs. Indeed, better understanding of what their effort in this direction is and how it can be fostered through cooperation with developed countries in the framework of voluntary deals might be more fruitful than going on trying to design differentiated emissions reduction obligations for all countries in a top-down approach. For this cooperative approach to work, 3Gs and developed countries must accept to implement the emissions monitoring, verification and reporting mechanisms deemed necessary to ensure the effectiveness of emissions reductions and conditioning 3Gs countries’ access to multilateral financial and technological support schemes (like the Green Climate Fund and the Technology Mechanism), built under the recent accords. Developed countries are important potential contributors as regards building capacity in green energy solutions engineering and operation.


Carlos Lopes
Executive Director of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research
The growing demand for and production of energy in developing countries with high rates of economic growth is creating unprecedented challenges for ensuring equitable socio-economic development and environmental sustainability. New modes of governance, knowledge transfer and capacity development are warranted to develop innovative, context specific and sustainable solutions. The Energy Pact Conference creates a valuable opportunity for stakeholders to address the future challenge of making energy, development, and environment needs mutually compatible.


Joe Lufkin
Director, Industrial Finance Corporation, Philippines
Infrastructure, the physical fabric by which a society organizes itself, is sometimes taken for granted but in fact is a major determinant of quality of life and driver of growth – especially in our rapidly-growing cities. The challenge today is to sustain economic development without further ruining our environment and climate or running out of energy.
At the same time, we must devise new ways to mobilize investment in the infrastructure needed, and do so at a time when our financial markets are under tremendous pressure and the massive debts of the last credit bubble need to be cleared.This conference will surely be a solid contribution to the global debate on these problems, and will generate new ideas, new actions and new mechanisms to solve them.


Prof. Urs Luterbacher
Chairman Environmental Studies Unit, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Evoking the three major dimensions of today’s global crisis, the international financial problems and the world economy, climate change, and the related energy questions seems almost banal these days. Nevertheless behind the apparent banality there is a real sense of urgency as the potential positive feedback between these three issues could create major disruptions and change significantly for the worse, the world as we know it. However, even this conjunction of crises can lead to what the famous economist Schumpeter has called creative destruction not just at the level of finance and business but also at the institutional and political level. The power of retrograde industrial lobbies can be broken as governments and international institutions can take on new roles of lenders of last resort, which shifts the balance of power toward them. We have to remember that some of the most significant international institutions of the last half-century were created and conceived in the midst of the chaos of World War II. The world seems to be now again at a crossroad where it can either move into the direction of increased international collaboration, the only way to solve the tremendous problems facing us, or retreat into localism and parochialism.

The challenges are daunting: Energy consumption has risen exponentially since the industrial revolution 250 years ago and it continues to rise today and will be probably only slowed down temporarily by the current economic crises. The world energy use grew by 2.7% during 2005. This increase is constituted mainly by a rise in oil consumption of 1.7%, a rise in natural gas of 2.4% and especially a rise in coal consumption of 5%. This latter figure is in some sense especially alarming because it signals a shift from oil and gas to coal because of its lower relative price and great availability in particular in emerging countries such as India and China.

This is preoccupying as coal produces more CO2 than the other fossil fuels. The rise in energy consumption is undoubtedly going to continue throughout the coming century, mainly because of the increasing industrialization of the developing countries. Indeed, the distribution of this energy per capita is highly uneven throughout the world. For example, the United States, France or Germany, which are all considered to be developed countries, represent respectively only about 5%, 0.9% and 1.4% of the total world population but account for 24%, 3% and 4% of the world’s energy use. Even if the United States is the most extreme example, it is clear that developed countries in general consume more energy per capita than the developing countries. Equating energy usage per capita throughout the world will greatly increase demand. If extreme climate change is to be avoided, such developments will have to take place with new technologies less or better completely independent of fossil fuels. But energy use through fossil fuels is not the only source of global warming. Agricultural production accounts also for a significant part of it: Directly through specific cultivation and animal raising practices and indirectly by contributing to deforestation. Since the world population is bound to increase to perhaps eight to nine billion people within the next decade, agriculture will have the task of providing food for this additional amount of people without contributing to increase greenhouse gases.

In order to resolve these issues among many others, international cooperation has to increase by leaps and bounds: New international institutions will probably have to be created, old ones modified to a considerable degree. Transfers of wealth and technologies to developing areas will have to be organized in order to assure global participation in the struggle against climate change. Finally, new technologies have to be invented and put to work. The task is huge but by no means impossible to achieve. It will only succeed if more efforts are made toward collaboration through painstaking discussions and bargaining processes in order to achieve workable consensus based agreements. The decentralized nature of the international system precludes any solutions imposed from the top. The energy pact conference constitutes a first step in this direction through discussions and dialogue between participants from many countries and across sectors from political decision makers to academics, businessmen and industrialists. One can only wish it full success.