Decentralized renewable energy and the climate change mitigation-adaptation nexus

摘要

This paper explores the role of decentralized renewable energy (DRE) projectsplay as a simultaneously mitigative and adaptive response to climate change. We develop ageneral conceptual framework that illustrates how introducing modern energy servicesthrough decentralized renewable energy can stabilize the ecological and social determinants of climate change vulnerability, while performing a critical climate change mitigation function. This framework is developed through a high-level overview of thekeyimplications of rural energy deprivation: deforestation and ecosystem degradation (withsignificant greenhouse gas emissions implications), chronic rural poverty, and high vulnerability to the negative impacts of climate change. We then explore global sustainabledevelopment pathways and the integral role that decentralized renewable energy can playin stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at levels that would preventdangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. We then describe howmitigation and adaptation synergies provide avenues for integrating sustainable development with climate policy, contextualized with respect to key relationships between theMillennium Development Goals and access to energy. We then turn to the related issue ofpoverty and climate change in the context of how climate stresses exacerbate poverty byimpairing the ecosystem services upon which the poor rely heavily. The conceptualframework concludes with a full description of the role DREs play in rural agroecosystems,particularly how DREs can enhance the flow of regulatory and provisioning ecosystemservices, and expand livelihood opportunities--all of which builds adaptive capacity forclimate change. The paper concludes with some comments and recommendations forenhancing the constructive role for DRE in overcoming the perceived divide betweenclimate change mitigation and adaptation policy.