Will China beat its 2030 deadline to stop carbon emissions growth? Mainland researchers think so
Government researchers’ findings come after climate change officials who, faced with a target review in 2018, earlier insisted country still faces many difficulties in curbing greenhouse gases
A senior Chinese climate change negotiator has rejected claims that China’s carbon emissions may already have peaked, but mainland researchers are gradually reaching a consensus that the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter may curb emissions faster than the government has already pledged.
Zou Ji, deputy director general of the National Centre for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, made the comments ahead of the annual UN climate summit in Morocco, which started on Monday. It will discuss how to implement the Paris climate agreement.
Zou said China’s flattened coal consumption and a stall in carbon emissions growth was a result of China’s economic slowdown and that emissions could pick up when the contraction ends.
“Even if China’s CO2 emissions in manufacturing drop, the country still faces an uphill battle to curb emissions growth in sectors such as transportation and construction,” he told a group of reporters in Beijing last week.
Two UK-based climate researchers, Fergus Green and Nicholas Stern, estimated in a research paper earlier this year that the peak in China’s carbon emissions may have already occurred in 2014 and it was “quite possible” emissions would “fall modestly from now on”.
