Energy drives development, economic as well as human, with advanced technologies as means to achieve this. The deprivations in energy in terms of quantity as well as quality causes lack of development thereby poverty and human sufferings. This technical paper is an attempt at providing deeper insights into these aspects with a focus on the developing countries of the Asia and the Pacific region. The paper begins with emphasizing the issues of securing energy needs of poor and climate change mitigation emerging as conflicting challenges, and their significance in the Asia-Pacific region in the global context. These challenges are extremely critical in the region because it has the highest energy deprivation among the poor at present and it is fast moving towards emerging as the biggest emitter of CO2 in the future. Further, the linkages between energy, poverty, sustainable development and climate change are analysed by developing different sets of indicators and the results suggested relatively strong association among these. Finally, the possibility of providing universal access to modern energy carriers for the households of the Asia-Pacific is explored by adopting a low-carbon pathway.