Leaving coal behind? A girl walks past a coal fired power station in Anhui province, China, close to … [+]
On Tuesday, China’s leader Xi Jinping pledged that the nation would go carbon neutral by 2060. The news sent ripples through the climate advocacy community, which has long viewed China’s direction on emissions as pivotal to the ability of the international community to achieve climate targets.
Xi, speaking at the 75th United Nations General Assembly in New York, said: “We aim to have CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. We call on all countries to pursue innovative, coordinated, green and open development for all.”
The announcement drew an official response from another international event in New York this week: Climate Week NYC.
“The significant announcement by Chinese President Xi Jinping during the UN General Assembly and in the midst of Climate Week NYC is very welcome,” said Amy Davidsen, North America executive director of the Climate Group, which runs Climate Week.
“China ramping-up its climate ambition comes just a week after the EU proposed increasing its own 2030 target,” Davidsen added. “Despite the absence of US federal leadership, at Climate Week NYC this year, we are seeing countries, business, states and cities encouraging each other to set more ambitious emission targets.”
It’s easy to see why the announcement has made waves: China is the most populous nation on Earth, and by many estimates the largest polluter. The Union of Concerned Scientists, using data from the International Energy Agency, puts China’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions at 28%, with the U.S. a distant second at 15%.
The share of CO2 emissions by country, updated this year by the Union of Concerned Scientists, shows … [+]
Because while the nation has made huge strides in developing green technologies and investing in renewable energy, it also uses about half of the world’s coal—the most polluting fossil fuel. Therefore, when it comes to emissions, anything China decides to do is likely to have an impact on the climate—not least on the efforts of the international community to achieve the Paris Agreement recommended target of keeping a global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius this century.
But given the country’s vast size and extremely varied levels of development, from the wealthy coastal east to the rural underdeveloped west, can China’s government, under the leadership of the Communist Party, really deliver on Xi’s pledge?
“President Xi’s statement at the UN General Assembly was just one sentence,” says Cameron Hepburn, director and professor of environmental economics at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford. “The language increases ambition, but at this point it remains non-committal.”
Nevertheless, Hepburn says, the statement is an important one. “It reflects real movement in the climate change discussion in China,” he says. “Several years ago the idea of net zero was a long way from the table—so while of course this brief remark leaves many questions unanswered, it is hugely significant.”
“The hard and urgent work is now to ensure that the upcoming 14th Five Year Plan is true to this long-term ambition and also ambitious in the short-term,” Hepburn adds. “China can, and should, peak its emissions well before 2030, and the next Five Year Plan is key to achieving that.”
But how is China to achieve such a turnaround? According to Yangsiyu Lu, researcher at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford, China ought to focus on three key policy areas.
“Firstly: coal,” Lu says. “China’s investment in coal in both domestic and foreign markets could be a significant obstacle to net zero targets and should be a key focus area of national policy.”
Lu notes that China has sent mixed message about coal use in recent months, at first approving more coal-fired plants in early 2020, then withdrawing some of them. And while the China-led Infrastructure Investment Bank said it would not finance any projects related to coal, China is also investing in coal-fired power plants in Southeast Asia and South Asia.
“As we are still waiting for more details of the recent pledge and we don’t know whether carbon neutrality incorporates Chinese foreign investment, we need to be cautious,” Lu says.
Next, China can boost technology innovation in electricity generation, including in energy storage, Lu says. Additionally, transmission infrastructure would need to be hugely overhauled, “which could solve the issue of high curtailment rate of wind/solar power in China for better renewables integration,” she adds.
Lastly, Lu explains, China is looking at “nature-based solutions” to eliminate or offset emissions, a set of initiatives the country proposed during the UN COP25 climate summit last year. This includes large scale greening campaigns, rewilding and initiatives such as Ant Forest, an award-winning scheme that rewards people for decreasing their carbon footprint. Developing these ecological solutions could not only address climate change, but also improve natural biodiversity, Lu says.
But will that be enough to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060?
“Technically, China could achieve net neutral carbon by 2060, since it is a global leader in clean energy, from wind and solar to electric vehicles,” Lu says, adding that China notably reached its 2020 carbon emissions target three years ahead of schedule, in 2017, having aimed to cut emissions from 2005 levels by 40-45% by 2020.
“However,” she adds, “many other questions remain to be answered properly, once we see further details on China’s intended and implemented actions.”
As flooding in Heilongjiang province this week showed, China is also facing severe climate threats.
Hepburn points out that it was in China’s own interests to deliver on its pledged target. “China hitting net zero by 2060 is not only possible but necessary for the country to avoid the worst impacts of climate change,” he says. “Bear in mind that much of the country’s productive output comes from exposed coastal areas now threatened by climate change, and that when the Himalayan glaciers melt, hundreds of millions of people risk running out of water.”
But even if China delivers net neutral carbon emissions by 2060, Hepburn says, it might not be enough. He notes that Climate Action Tracker has released an initial assessment of China’s net-zero announcement, showing that the goal would lower global warming predictions by between 0.2 and 0.3 degrees Celsius. Therefore, he says, “with China on board, warming could be limited to 2.4—2.5 degrees. However, that’s still far above the 1.5-degree target necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”
The bottom line?
“China is an important player,” Hepburn says, “but everyone needs to step up.”
