Clean energy technologies aren't being deployed fast enough, putting the world on track for a temperature increase of at least six degrees Celsius under current policies, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.

A two-degree Celsius temperature rise in average global temperatures is widely seen as the safe limit to prevent disastrous climate change.

In particular, current policies aren't stimulating sufficient investment in developing carbon capture and storage--seen by many as a key clean energy technology--to strip out and store emissions from highly polluting coal- and gas-fired power plants as well as industrial processes.

This lack of progress on CCS could potentially result in higher carbon emissions over the next few decades for the duration of the lifetime of the coal power plants that are currently being built and higher costs in cutting emissions in the future, said the IEA's Deputy Executive Director Richard Jones.

"CCS is trapped in its infancy and coal is continuing to dominate power generation. The outlook for clean coal is disappointing," Jones told 23 ministers gathered in London to discuss the progress of clean energy deployment.

Despite recent concerns over climate warming gases from the burning of fossil fuels, the world still relies heavily on coal: in the past decade around half the world's energy needs were met by coal, primarily in electricity generation, Jones said.

More coal plants are being built to meet surging power demand in rapidly growing economies such as China and India . Nearly half of the new plants are using what Jones described as "sub-optimal technology," which is significantly more polluting and less energy efficient than the new "ultra super-critical" coal power plants, Jones said.

Such plants being built with sub-optimal technology number in the hundreds in countries such as China and India , Jones said.

"The longer we go without more CCS-favorable policies, the larger [the problem] becomes," he said.

Around 70 CCS projects are on the drawing board. Although there are four CCS projects in operation, none of the schemes are in power generation, instead capturing relatively pure streams of carbon dioxide from gas extraction in places such as the North Sea , Canada and Algeria , Jones said.

This is a far cry from the IEA's 2009 roadmap for CCS, which called for 100 CCS projects by 2020 in order to reach 3,400 by 2050.

More investment in research and development, better regulatory frameworks and more demonstration projects are urgently required, Jones said.

In its annual progress report tracking the clean energy sector, published Thursday, the IEA said that under current policies energy use would increase by a third by 2020 and carbon dioxide emissions would almost double by 2050, resulting in a global temperature increase of at least six degrees Celsius.

Technologies such as energy efficiency in the building and industrial sectors and improvement in vehicle fuel efficiency are also making halting progress, the report from the Paris-based energy watchdog said.

However, progress is being made on renewables, such as onshore wind energy and solar panels. Onshore wind has grown an average 27% a year over the past decade, and solar photovoltaic has grown at 42%, albeit from a small base, the report said.

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