Beijing: The annual plenary session of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the top legislature of the country, held in March unveiled new targets for achieving carbon neutralization. They included reducing energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP respectively by 13.5 percent and 18 percent during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) period.
China made the commitment to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 40-45 percent by 2020 as compared with 2005 at the UN Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen. It also committed to simultaneously increasing the proportion of non-fossil energy consumption to 15 percent of its total energy mix. The commitments were honored ahead of schedule. By 2019, China’s carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP had dropped by 48 percent, and its non-fossil energy consumption ratio risen to 15.3 percent.
On September 22, 2020, President Xi Jinping said at the General Debate of the 75th Session of the UN General Assembly that China would peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.
Essential measures: what will be done to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060? To realize low-carbon transition, China has started making economic structural adjustment and industrial upgrading, optimizing the energy structure and establishing a green low-carbon economic system. The following will become priorities to meet the target.
Advancing economic transformation and making innovation the driving force of green development. The digital economy and hi-tech industries should be further developed, for digitalization will promote low-carbon development. Greenhouse gas emissions should be slashed by restricting the development of energy-intensive heavy and chemical industries and adjusting product and industrial structures while maintaining sustained economic development.
Conserving natural resources, developing the circular economy, and supporting sustained economic and social development with as optimized energy and resource consumption as possible. To this end, advanced technologies have to be widely adopted and energy substitution speeded up. By 2050, China must complete building a nearly zero-carbon-emission energy system with new energy and renewable energy as the principal part.
During the next 10 years, the development of wind and solar power should be accelerated, realizing an average annual growth of 100 million kilowatts. Industries featuring high energy consumption such as steel, cement, petrochemicals, chemicals and building materials should take the lead in peaking carbon dioxide emissions during the 14th Five-Year Plan period. In addition, the carbon trading market should be improved, emission reduction and technical innovation advanced by taking advantage of the market mechanism, and non-governmental investment encouraged in low-carbon green industries.
–The Daily Mail-Beijing Review news exchange item
