The director of the International Renewable Energy Agency said Monday from Abu Dhabi an outdated energy mentality was hurting the global climate.
"A convergence of social, economic and environmental forces is transforming the global energy system as we know it," IRENA Director-General Adnan Amin said in a statement. "But if we continue on the path we are currently on and fuel our growing economies with outmoded ways of thinking and acting, we will not be able avoid the most serious impacts of climate change."
A draft report published in August by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds emissions are falling in most Western countries because of an increased use of low-carbon energy resources and improvements in energy efficiency. The rising industrialization of Asian economies, however, may be offsetting some of the progress.
IRENA said in a 96-page report published Monday renewable energy has moved from the margins to play a majority role in investments in new power capacity. It's now time, the report said, to revisit the policies and investments driving renewables forward in order to sustain the momentum.
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and Mario Molina, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, wrote last week in British newspaper The Guardian "bold initiatives" are needed to slow global greenhouse emissions.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hosts a climate summit in New York later this month.
