A critical overview of industrial energy decoupling programs in six developing countries in Asia

In reviewing the journal literature on the decoupling of energy use and industrial output in the Asian region, particularly with respect to developing countries, we found little information about most country programs other than for China and India and only one article that compared the programs of these two countries. For this reason, we used diverse sources to identify the key programmatic features that have contributed, but clearly are not totally responsible for, decoupling achievements of two countries ( China and Thailand) and then, on the basis of these findings, reviewed emerging industrial energy decoupling programs in four other countries (India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam). We found that the design of the two successful on-going decoupling programs have common features, which are setting an explicit target for decoupling of energy use and industrial output, a government program that offers financial incentives and imposes specific auditing and reporting requirements and involvement of the manufacturing sector in designing and implementing targets as they apply to individual enterprises. We also found that the emerging programs in the other four countries lack some or all of these essential programmatic features.

► We reviewed two on-going and four emerging industrial energy decoupling programs.
► These six Asian developing countries have very different rates of decoupling.
► The two successful on-going programs share three common features.
► These are quantitative targets, supportive programs and industry involvement.
► The four emerging programs lack some or all of these features.