Developing countries are in a position to leapfrog the west in economic development by rapidly adopting clean technology, French President François Hollande told the annual meeting of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development last week.
“They are going to be skipping the stage where industrialized countries were stopped for a long time, for many decades,” Hollande said. “We were dependent on fossil fuel, which means we now have to concentrate on the transition in the medium to long term of abandoning fossil fuels. But they have the chance to move immediately to the new technologies.”
While the old world is proud of its built environment, developing countries have the opportunity to build scores of new cities to consume less energy and emit less carbon. “He compared the opportunity with the mobile phone revolution in Africa, whereby as mobile phone technology dropped in price and became widely available all over the continent, there was little incentive to build conventional fixed line phones,” The Guardian reports.
