China-US cooperation crucial in climate change fight

China and the United States may be facing competition in many fields, but the global fight against climate change offers necessary, crucial opportunities for cooperation between the two sides, analysts and experts said.

"There's no doubt that the countries are strategic competitors and we're competitors across all the domains … technology, finance, the economy … but despite that, we still have common goals and shared interests. We need to have peace, a world order and a stable climate," former US treasury secretary Henry Paulson said at an international forum hosted by the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization think tank on Monday.

As the world's major carbon emitters, the two countries need to work together in developing the breakthrough technologies needed to avoid climate disaster, to work on eliminating tariffs on environmental goods and services, to provide incentives to channel private sector funds to develop in scale green capabilities and to do more to share and deploy those effectively, he said.

Paulson was speaking at an online dialogue session under CCG's eighth annual China and Globalization Forum, which brought international scholars, analysts and other luminaries from the public and private sector together to discuss global issues as part of the three-day event.

CCG's president Wang Huiyao, who hosted the dialogue, said green infrastructure and other sustainable development fields pointed to the future and global stakeholders had much to gain from working with each other.

A green Belt and Road Initiative, for example, can help set the standards, Wang said.

Paulson, who also heads the non-partisan Paulson Institute which focuses on fostering a US-China relationship to help maintain global order, said the world's large countries needed to do more to incentivize industry via public-private partnerships bringing together government, business and NGOs to meet environmental targets.

For example, multilateral development and financial institutions such as projects under the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank can help pave the way for more government involvement to provide the capacity for necessary cooperation, he said.

The presence of major Chinese property developer China Vanke, led by its founder Wang Shi, in the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland, was also an encouraging example of how involvement by Chinese enterprises could contribute significantly to the global environmental priorities, Paulson said.

With the building sector and its related fields accounting for a significant part of carbon emissions, industry players have laid out clear plans and commitments in line with the country's low-carbon goals, Wang said during the center's online forum with Paulson.

"To better facilitate cooperation and collaboration between China and the US … we have to set aside conflicts of interests; biodiversity and conservation are equally important as climate change issues," Wang said.
"We have to take the initiative in preserving and protecting nature together, to explore ways for common development."

"We need peace, we need prosperity, we need a global order that works," Paulson said. "We need to save our planet because climate change is not a threat only to economic security but also global stability. We have a saying in the US that 'necessity is the mother of invention', I happen to believe that necessity is going to bring us together," he said.