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Opinion | How China is quietly becoming the world’s climate champion
As Chinese officials play a larger part in global climate negotiations, Beijing’s decarbonisation agenda could cement its leadership role
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China’s energy and climate change ambitions are in the spotlight again. This time, much of the attention comes from the recently concluded United Nations climate conference, Cop29, in Baku, Azerbaijan.
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During that often heated and contentious 12-day conference, Chinese diplomacy was at its finest, set against a markedly placid United States presence. Washington’s retreat in most things climate-related partly stems from Donald Trump’s re-election as US president given his apparent antipathy towards climate change mitigation.
His actions during his first term in office didn’t bode well for the global climate change agenda. In 2017, he decided to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, describing global warming as a hoax. The withdrawal was completed in 2020. The US rejoined the accord in 2021 but Trump could withdraw again.
Yet, China took the high ground during Cop29, filling the void left by the US. When delegates from developing nations became exasperated over the initial offer by richer nations of US$250 billion per year by 2035 to help battle the impact of climate change in the Global South, Chinese delegates worked “to soothe angry delegations”, Bloomberg reported.
Zhao Yingmin, one of China’s Cop29 delegates and the country’s vice-minister of ecology and environment, went a step further. He reportedly held one-on-one meetings with delegates from developing nations in the last hours of the conference to warn that things would be worse without a final finance agreement.
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A deal was finally reached, calling for wealthy nations to fund US$300 billion per year by 2035 but still far from the US$1 trillion that many were hoping for.
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