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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.

Cross-impact methods are planning, foresight and decision support tools often used in conjunction with the scenario technique. They enable systems modeling in a theory-driven way, grounded in expert judgment and understanding. This article presents the EXIT approach, a novel modeling technique and a computational method for structural cross-impact analysis. EXIT extracts insights from an expert-sourced cross-impact model, which describes the structure of direct interactions within a system. The EXIT transformation produces a relative quantification of the emergent, systemic relationships between model components, effectuating over the complex web of interactions in the system. Compared to the more established matrix multiplication approach, EXIT produces novel and more detailed analytical outputs on the basis of similar input, and offers new analytical possibilities in structural cross-impact analysis. A software implementing the EXIT transformation is freely available.

Climate change and global economic pressures are strong drivers for energy economies to transition towards climate-neutrality, low-carbon economy and better energy and resource efficiencies. The response to these pressures, namely the increased use of renewable energy, creates a set of new challenges related to supply-demand balance for energy policy and electricity system planning. This study analyses the emergent problems resulting from the renewable energy response. These complex aspects of change in the electricity system are analysed with a cross-impact model based on an expert-driven modeling process, consisting of workshops, panel evaluations and individual expert work. The model is then analysed using a novel computational cross-impact technique, EXIT. The objective of the study is to map the important direct drivers of change in the period 2017–2030 in electricity consumption and production in Finland, construct a cross-impact model from this basis, and discover the emergent and systemic dynamics of the modeled system by analysis of this model. publishedVersion

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 study investigates the effect of the change of economic structure on the emissions and energy use in China. The study uses the ChinaLINDA model, a calculation framework especially well-suited for analyzing structural change and sectoral shifts in Chinese economy and industry. We illustrate the implications of the different economic development paths up to year 2030 regarding emissions, energy use and employment with a set of three scenarios. In comparison with the reference scenario, the reduction in CO2 emission level in Policy scenario is less than 1 3 by 2030 even with huge investment in renewable energy capacity and a clear turn away from carbon-intensive growth pattern. Cumulatively the difference of emissions between the Reference scenario and Policy scenario within 2013–2030 is less than 20%. The Chinese CO2 intensity and energy intensity targets are rather stringent. Reaching the CO2 intensity target is difficult even with the optimistic assumption of fast expansion of renewable energy capacity and fast structural change. However, while the renewable energy capacity grows fast, targets set for it are not equally ambitious. The set CO2 intensity and energy intensity targets call for concretization of energy policy.

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 article presents a study of the interrelationships between the different dimensions of sustainability as measured by the sustainable society index framework. We examine the statistical relationships between the four indices making up the sustainable society index framework. The analysis uses the complete existing data set provided by Sustainable Society Foundation for the years 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012 and for 151 countries. While the time period where data are available is quite short, we can make some preliminary observations about the apparent trends in the interrelationships of the different dimensions of sustainability. This study shows that the three dimensions of sustainability are far from all being synergic and positively correlated. There is a strong negative correlation between human well-being and environmental well-being. This is problematic from the point of view of the Brundtland Commission’s three-pillar definition of sustainability. However, the trade-off relationship between econom...

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.