China does hard yards on climate

Ambitious targets present all with a tough challenge, experts say

Editor's Note: The 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties has begun in Glasgow, Scotland. This page highlights China's commitment to developing green and low-carbon energy, and the urgency of international efforts to meet climate goals.

In its latest commitment to tackling the climate crisis, China pledged to end all financing of coal-fired power plants in other countries, and experts say the world's largest developing country deserves credit for its efforts in tackling climate change, and all countries should shoulder more responsibility to cut global emissions.

At the United Nations General Assembly in September, President Xi Jinping said: "China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy, and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad."

Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a China expert and chairman of the Kuhn Foundation, said the Global Development Initiative Xi proposed in his UN speech encourages positive forces.

Such commitment "puts climate change theory into real world practice by reducing greenhouse gases, an action step unmatched by the fine rhetoric of others", Xinhua News Agency quoted Kuhn as saying.

In the run-up to the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties in Glasgow that began on Sunday, the State Council published its plan detailing how China will reach peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030.

Under the plan, the share of nonfossil energy consumption by 2030 would amount to 25 percent, and CO2 emissions per unit of GDP would fall by more than 65 percent compared with 2005 levels. By 2030, 40 percent of new vehicles would be powered by clean energy.

China has reaffirmed that its CO2 emissions will reach a peak before 2030 and that carbon neutrality will be achieved by 2060. The government has also integrated the goal into the country's wider environmental plans.

Neil Hirst, a senior policy fellow at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, said: "China has made some very considerable contributions to the climate effort, and its more recent announcement of carbon neutrality by 2060 is a bold step that also had a big international impact."

The success of the Paris Agreement was largely based on the joint support of Xi and then-US president Barack Obama, including China's commitment that its emissions will peak no later than 2030, he said.

"China deserves credit for its world-leading deployment of renewables and for big reductions in emissions per unit of GDP. China's emissions per person are still less than those of the US."

Hirst is the author of The Energy Conundrum: Climate Change, Global Prosperity, and the Tough Decisions We Have to Make.

The low-carbon commitment, as estimated, requires China to make the transition from reaching its carbon peak to realizing carbon neutrality within 30 years.

The Copenhagen Summit in 2009 set China's carbon intensity goal for 2020 at a 40 to 45 percent cut from 2005 levels. According to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, compared with 2005, greenhouse emissions per unit of GDP fell by 48 percent by 2019 in China, meaning the country reached its target well ahead of schedule.