Trends of energy consumption and driving forces for mitigation of CO2 emissions in Malaysia: A multi-sectoral analysis

Energy consumption and CO₂ emissions are integral to the issues of growth in all nations and have become a significant policy issue in Malaysia to promote sustainable development and combat climate change. In this paper, multi-sectoral energy consumption and CO₂ emission have been investigated to identify and analyze the driving forces for offsetting CO₂ emissions in five final-energy consuming sectors. Besides, by following the “Kaya identity” CO₂ emissions are decomposed into the product of four driving factors: population, GDP/population (per capita economic output), TPES/GDP (energy intensity of the economic output), and CO₂/TPES (carbon intensity of the energy mix). Due to growing industrialization and increasing standard of living, all sectors of the whole country experienced energy demand desperately mainly the non-energy sector, which rose by 17.5% and the industry sector by 15.0% where transport (36.8%) and industry (29.8%) sectors were the largest consumers of energy. The result shows that overall CO₂ emission grew by 6.7% between the years of 1990 to 2011due to the combined growth in population (2.2%) and in per capita GDP (3.5%). This study serves as a guideline for further investigation and research in order to reduce the CO₂ emissions, which can promote sustainable energy use as well as the environmental sustainability.