Environmental Problems and Development Policies for Renewable Energy in BRIC countries

According to well-known forecasts by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) main challenge for future generations seems to be global warming mainly caused by fossil fuels source of energy. Kyoto protocol appears a weak response to this challenge, in particular as BRIC countries growth is increasing in last years with respect to developed countries. But a detailed analysis reveals that BRIC countries aren’t energy-hungry as we could expect, and part of their increasing emissions depend on de-localization of industrial plant from developed countries. In addition to these, statistics reveal that BRIC countries face a major challenge in the land and forest management as sequestering instruments for CO2. The consequence on long term GHGs emission path could be relevant, if policies on renewable “green” energy and energy efficiency will be adopted. So official commitments by each country at home and in the international system of the COP and the BRICS conference are analyzed and compared. As energy is the most important cause for GHG emissions, we focalize on the pattern of overall energy consumption in the BRIC countries, the shift among sources and the reasons for its reduction. Overall energy intensity seems to be reduced in the BRIC countries – less sharply after 2003 – excluding Brazil. We analyse this reduction. According to the existing analyses, a part of the decreasing emissions is due to the adoption of less polluting energy sources, including the renewable sources of energy. Their adoption of the renewables is relatively large in absolute terms, but is small in relative terms. As they remain uncompetitive in economic terms – like in the OECD countries – and lacking strong commitments to reduce emissions, we suppose that their adoption, driven by policy instruments, is mainly due to classical industrial policy reasons.