Introduction: Sustainability of Energy Systems

Over the decade, sustainable low carbon future has become the focus for contemporary policy discussions. The path toward decoupling economic growth with energy, especially fossil energy is a challenging one. It requires top-down, coordinated effort among public institutions to establish a supportive policy and political environment; and bottom-up, the deployment of technological measures through efficient financing instruments. Recent years have seen an increasing use of the integrated energy-economic-environment modeling framework for facilitating the decision-making process. These include the macroeconomic modeling framework, the process-driven modeling framework, and a combination of both frameworks. While the energy analysis and modeling tools are useful in understanding the evolution of the energy systems, the global energy policy and geopolitics are receiving more and more influence from the development of unconventional resources. Essentially, it is uncertain what the future of the global and regional dynamics could evolve as more unconventional resources become recoverable outside the oil exporting economies. Nonetheless, sustainable development toward a low carbon future cannot be achieved by an individual country. Moving forward, it requires transnational cooperation beyond Kyoto Protocol and climate change negotiations if, indeed, nations worldwide are serious about making the Earth a better living place.