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Climate mitigation policy in China

The 13th Five-Year Plan (FYP) period running from 2016 to 2020 is very crucial for China. Domestically, the dense smog and haze that frequently hit Beijing and other places in China, together with steeply rising oil imports, are raising great concern about a range of environmental problems, health risks, and energy security. Internationally, given that it is already the world’s largest energy consumer and carbon emitter, and that its energy use and carbon emissions continue to rise rapidly as it moves quickly towards being the largest world economy in the next one to two decades, China is facing great pressure, both inside and outside the international climate negotiations, to be more ambitious in combating global climate change. From its own perspective, China cannot afford to (and from an international perspective is not expected to) continue on the conventional path of encouraging economic growth, as three decades of almost uninterrupted double-digit growth has come at the high price of pollution and the exploitation of natural resources. Clearly, balancing China’s energy needs to fuel its economic growth with the resulting potential impacts of climate change presents an enormous climate policy dilemma, not just for China, but for the entire world. The Chinese leaders are fully aware of these challenges. In response, the 18th Conference of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China adopted a general policy of Ecological Civilisation, placed ecological goals at the same level of priority as existing policies on economic, political, cultural, and social development, and emphasised that Ecological Civilisation would be fully implemented in all aspects of economic development. With the grand vision of Ecological Civilisation, the issue is then how China explores concrete, constructive, and realistic solutions in the 13th FYP and beyond in order to succeed in transitioning to a low-carbon, green economy. To that end, China needs to cap nationwide coal consumption, cut coal consumption in absolute terms in severely polluted regions, and make unprecedented efforts to keep energy consumption and carbon emissions under control in key energy-consuming industries and cities in the context of government decentralisation and unprecedented urbanisation. China will need to strengthen and expand flagship programmes and initiatives and supportive economic policies, and harness market forces to promote industrial upgrading and energy conservation and further increase the widespread use of renewable energy, and it will need to enhance the implementation of these policies and measures in order to genuinely transform into a low-carbon economy.