CO2 emissions, energy and sustainable development in Ecuador 1980-2025

Climate changes, energy and sustainable development are key issues nowadays in the global scientific and political agendas. These issues have important implications for development process and national policy in all regions of the planet. It is a very complicated task to predict how much the economy of country will grow and how much energy it will need in the near future. We have to note that this growth will strongly modulate CO2 emissions of any country and therefore it will be crucial to make a realistic estimate of the emissions. Also the different feedback-mechanisms, both in climatic and economic system make any predictions highly questionable beyond 5-10 years. However, it is critical to provide accurate information to policymakers in order to design appropriate energy policies for the near future. This book proposes a new methodology that can be useful to estimate CO2 emissions for a given country and to understand the driving forces that guide this process. It is easily transferable to other regions, and time periods. Also it is pedagogically useful for explaining to policymakers the possible ways to design a policy for reducing emissions in a medium term.