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This article analyses energy trends in Cambodia and Laos and constructs future scenarios. The target is (i) to compare different scenario methods, (ii) to construct scenarios with these methods, (iii) to analyse the future energy demand and the related CO 2 emissions and (iv) to analyse the potential role of renewable energy sources and their impact on CO 2 emissions. Decomposition scenarios have been constructed based on the trends of the drivers of the energy consumption and CO 2 emissions. More detailed scenarios have been constructed using combined LEAP/LINDA models to take into account the structural socio-economic and technological changes in the energy system. The paper provides a novel combination of bottom-up modelling and macroeconomic modelling. The constructed scenarios indicate rapid increase in energy consumption and related CO 2 emissions mainly due to the fast economic growth and industrialization. Increase in fossil fuel use in electricity production in the future increases the emissions considerably. The potential of different renewable agricultural residues is analysed to evaluate the possibilities to reduce the CO 2 emissions and fossil fuel import dependence. The reduction potential is considerably large in both countries.

Sustainability Window is a new analysis tool for assessing the sustainability of development simultaneously in all of its three dimensions (environmental, economic, and social). The analysis method provides information of the maximum and minimum economic development that is required to maintain the direction of social and environmental development towards more sustainable targets. With the Sustainability Window method it is possible to easily analyze the sustainability using different indicators and different time periods making comparative analyses easy. The new method makes it also possible to analyze the dynamics of the sustainability and the changes over time in the width of the window. This provides a new perspective for analyzing the trends of sustainability and the impacts of underlying sustainability policies. As an illustration of the method, we have carried out an analysis of Chinese development using CO2 and SO2 emissions as indicators of the environmental dimension, number of non-poor people as an indicator of the social dimension and GDP as an indicator of the economic dimension. peerReviewed

This article investigates the factors that impact the amount of CO2 emissions from fuel combustion and energy use in three major economies in the world, China, the EU-27 and the United States, using mathematical decomposition analysis, where the observed change in explained variable is divided into meaningful components. These components' shares of the total change can be compared and the change in the shares over time can be studied. We have conducted two different types of mathematical decomposition analyses: first, the chained decomposition analysis, in which the observed change in CO2 from fuel combustion is decomposed to four intensity factors and an extensive factor, population; and second, the sectoral decomposition analysis of the final energy use, where the change in final energy use in agricultural, industrial and service sectors are decomposed to activity, intensity and structural effects in the different sectors. The results of the decomposition analyses indicate similar trends of convergence in the three economies. This can be interpreted to be caused by the globalisation of the economic processes, which directs the production processes of businesses to develop in similar patterns. On the other hand, there are also differences in the development trends caused by the different structures of the three economies.

This paper presents a new assessment tool developed for the analysis of synergies and trade-offs between selected development trends. We suggest new quantitative measures for the concepts of synergy, trade-off and delinking. The tool is developed to analyse the synergy between two different trends, but it can be used to analyse simultaneously the synergy between three trends representing the three different dimensions of sustainable development. The use of the tool is demonstrated with several examples from European Union countries. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

The chapter analyzes the past trends in energy production and consumption in Cambodia and Laos, and constructs their energy scenarios for future. It aims to predict and analyze the energy supply and demand in these countries and tries to assess their dependence on foreign countries for energy and examines the sources of domestic renewable energy sources and compares the data with future energy that can be generated using these resources. The future scenarios were developed with two different planning models: long-range energy alternative planning (LEAP) and long-range integrated development analysis (LINDA) to assess the present and future energy supply/demand. The LEAP model utilizes mainly the household data collected by our research team. The model analyzes the impact of different technological changes at household level with bottom-up approach, while the LINDA model is based on macro level changes in all sectors. Decomposition analysis analyzes the drivers of energy consumption. The chapter analyzes the biomass energy potential of agricultural wastes (especially rice husk and rice straw) in Cambodia and Laos with the existing technologies to evaluate the possibilities of reducing dependence on imported energy.