Better energy efficiency, more renewables and less coal use set stage for emissions reductions

China is well on track to deliver its Copenhagen pledge to cut carbon emissions, according to Climate Change: A Risk Assessment, a report newly issued by the University of Cambridge's Centre for Science and Policy.

In 2009, China set its 2020 carbon management target under the Copenhagen Accord to cut carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 40 to 45 percent compared with 2005. The accord was reached at the Climate Change Conference in the Danish capital in 2009.

Although its total carbon emissions have grown from 5.1 billion tons in 2005 to almost 9 billion last year, the growth has been steadily falling since 2005 and has reached almost zero, the report says.

On June 30, China extended its pledge, announcing that as part of a global climate pact to be adopted this year in Paris, it will aim to reduce its emissions in 2030 per unit of GDP by 60 to 65 percent from 2005 levels.

The Cambridge report was written by five experts, including David King, the UK's permanent special representative for climate change and its former chief scientific adviser, and Qi Ye and Zhou Dadi, two senior climate change experts from China. It assesses global risks of climate change and provides policy proposals to address them. China is one focus of the report.

"Several different government policies have played key roles in bringing down the carbon growth rate (in China)," they write, listing improvements in energy efficiency in all major sectors. The best coal-fired power plants in China now lead the world in energy efficiency, and the national average efficiency of all power plants is amongst the best in the world; coal-fired power plants now use less than 290 grams of coal to generate 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity, the report says. For the United States last year, the average per kWh was 470 grams.

China's Top 1,000 Enterprises Program, a government program focused on the biggest energy consumers in China, "saved more carbon emissions in five years than the EU has saved under the Kyoto Protocol," the report says.

A second factor that slowed carbon emissions growth, the report says, is development of renewable energy, with China now contributing a quarter of the world's total renewable energy. It found that the installed capacity of solar power generation had grown by over 28 gigawatts in 2014 from 700 megawatts in 2005, a fortyfold increase, and predicted that "China might overtake Germany to become the largest developer of solar power in the world by the end of 2015."

Leadership by some provincial and municipal governments in exploring low-carbon paths is also considered a positive. The report noted that 42 provinces or cities entered a national pilot program for low-carbon development from 2009 to 2012, persuading local officials to opt for a different method of addressing economic growth and climate change.

Other causes listed by the report include concern over air pollution and the decision to launch a nationwide carbon market in 2016 to price carbon emissions. It predicted that the Chinese carbon market would reach over twice the size of the cap-and-trade program of the European Union, making it the largest in the world.

The determination to cut air pollution meant setting a cap for coal consumption in key regions, which meant a reduction of 290 million tons in 2014 compared with the previous year.

The report highlighted the bilateral agreement between China and the US on clean energy cooperation, signed last November, and noted the most important component of the agreement is the commitment to achieve 2 percent of non-fossil energy in the overall energy mix.

Reaching this target requires "800 to 1,000 gW of new electricity generation capacity to be added, based on wind, water, solar and nuclear, requiring an investment of $1.8 trillion," the report says, but if these goals are achieved they open the possibility of large-scale economies bringing down the cost of non-fossil technologies and will encourage more developing countries to follow suit.

King pays attention to what is called the "new norm" for China's economy, which has meant a slower annual GDP growth target, about 7 percent this year. "That's designed to allow the ecosystem management to be alongside human management", he says.

His ideas are shared by Neil Morisetti, director of strategy at the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy, University College London. "Asia-Pacific is the most fundamental region in terms of climate change and we are glad that China is adopting low-carbon policies that include replacements for coal. But the pressure is high, too, because you have to raise the people's living standards while cutting carbon emissions," he says. "That requires leadership - both in Beijing and on the provincial level."

King also welcomes changes to the policy of the Communist Party of China, which "include the reference to ecological civilization".

"In China the challenges brought by climate change are especially serious considering the huge population," he says. "Four hundred million people are now living in the eastern coastal region of that country. The Chinese government is fully aware of the challenges," King says, adding that the rest of the world was focusing on how China would deliver its response.

zhangzhouxiang@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 07/24/2015 page30)