Developing countries' energy needs and priorities under a sustainable development perspective: A linguistic decision support approach

Sustainable Development (SD) has been discussed extensively in the theoretical literature since the concept was adopted as an overarching goal of economic, social development and environmental protection. The relationship between SD and climate change is of particular importance to developing countries due to their development process and the particular climate challenges that many of them face. The notion is that strategies pursuing SD and climate change mitigation can be mutually reinforcing. In the frame of climate change, the transfer of low-carbon sustainable technologies could ideally provide a framework of helping developing countries to find new sustainable development paths. The aim of this paper is to present a Linguistic Decision Support Approach, based on the Linguistic Ordered Weighted Averaging (LOWA) operator, with the objective of assessing developing countries' energy service needs and priorities. In our approach, a range of energy services and criteria for the assessment were defined, related stakeholders were also involved so as to identify energy service needs and priorities that are most applicable to the country's sustainable development. In this respect, the approach followed could enhance the so far applied Technology Needs Assessments (TNA) and establish a clear understanding of the host country's overall medium to long-term energy and environmental strategy. The application of the particular approach to cross representative developing countries around the world indicated energy efficiency in industry and electricity for industry as high priority energy services.