“Overcapacity”, a geeky economic term, has recently become the new buzzword for international discussion around China’s solar and electric vehicle industries. It is also becoming one of the thorniest issues in China’s relations with other major economies.

Notably, the word was mentioned five times in the G7 Leaders Communiqué released last week, with the G7 countries framing it collectively as a global challenge.

It is a debate that was initially sparked by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen during her April visit to Beijing. According to her, China’s cleantech industry has excess capacities that cannot be absorbed domestically, leading to exports at depressed prices. And she stressed that this should be a concern not only for the US, but also for Europe and other emerging markets.

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China strongly disagreed with this claim, while Yellen’s concern resonated in the EU, which has long focused on China’s market dominance. In short, there is an overcapacity of “overcapacities”, with neither side finding identical terms of reference. But as this debate is a harbinger of how climate solutions and political agendas will interweave, it’s worth parsing out some lessons for each side, on their own terms.

The US’ “overcapacity” claim as presented by Yellen is a non-starter in China.

China’s clean energy industry is an important point of pride internationally and a source of legitimacy domestically for Beijing. From that perspective countering the “overcapacity” claim is both emotionally and strategically important.

Strategically, this claim is being used to justify trade measures and tariffs against China’s clean energy products. Emotionally, the cleantech industry is a modern-day success story of China’s entrepreneurship and innovation. In China’s public discourse, the US “overcapacity” claims lands as a rejection of that success.

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The result is a political debate in which – by design – no side can convince the other. And the lesson? This posturing is at odds with US-China climate diplomacy as we’ve known it to function in the past. Whatever objectives this approach serves, it does not include closer climate collaboration between the US and China, even as multilateral climate action at the UN level still requires them to take action in concert.

In China, discussion on “overcapacity” emerged from an ongoing conversation about how to manage investment hype. And the answer lies on the demand side.

For investors inside China at a time of challenging economics, few industries are as attractive as the clean energy industry. And business leaders have focused on the risks of hot money and breakneck expansion of clean energy manufacturing capacity for some time now, particularly in the solar industry.

This was probably the origin of “overcapacity”. But in China, this has been a familiar, almost perennial discussion of investment and industrial cycles. While the US argument equates exports to overcapacity, Chinese companies argue that it is demand that determines overcapacity, and they make investment and expansion decisions based on projections of both domestic and global demand.

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That said, the size of China’s domestic market means it will remain the “base” for Chinese manufacturers. In the overseas market, the “overcapacity” claim underscores the complexity and uncertainties Chinese companies face.

For Chinese policymakers, one obvious response to the new market dynamics should be taking domestic demand to new levels. That means addressing lingering questions for China’s renewable energy future – namely, how to resolve the impact of coal. China’s power market was designed for a system dependent on coal, but it needs reform to allow wind and solar to take the central role. Injecting new political momentum to accelerate the reform will be key.

The EU has long been concerned about China’s market dominance, and the “overcapacity” debate is pushing it to decide its role in this trilateral trade and climate dynamic.

Even before this debate erupted, the EU had already begun, subtly, to diversify supply chains and build its own industrial strength, reducing dependence on Chinese products. Last week, the EU announced a maximum tariff of 38% on imported Chinese-made electric vehicles, concluding that Chinese EV makers are benefiting from “unfair subsidies”.

At this stage, it’s still unclear if this is the end of the EU’s low-key approach to date. Cultivating an EU-based clean industry hub without compromising the global response to climate change is a challenge, especially as the EU positions itself as a climate leader.

Entering the fray of US-China tension only makes this feat more complex, especially given uncertainties on the US end in an election year. How the EU approaches this climate and trade nexus will ultimately shape the trilateral dynamic among the world’s three largest carbon emitters in the coming years.

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For China, where relations with the EU and other countries are concerned, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the hidden messages in the “overcapacity” debate. Other countries want more than just Chinese products.

Climate leadership is not a buyer-seller relationship, but one between partners who want solutions that create local jobs, develop opportunities, and enable native development of a sustainable future.

China should see its role in the global clean transition as more than a manufacturing hub. The transition requires tools, technology, finance and know-how, and China has much to offer. It is time for China to think more creatively about how to leverage its industrial advantages to provide the solutions with which the world is currently under-supplied.

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But oil, gas and coal producers are still closing their ears. In 2023, they continued spewing near record-high amounts of methane into the atmosphere, according to the latest assessment by the International Energy Agency (IEA) released on Wednesday. That is despite a raft of promises to stop doing so.

Now, however, analysts believe the tide may finally be turning. The introduction of stronger regulations in key fossil fuel-producing and consuming countries, coupled with better monitoring and transparency of harmful leaks, gives them cause for optimism.

“While emissions are still very high, 2024 is going to be a watershed moment on action and transparency on methane,” said Christophe McGlade, head of the IEA’s energy supply unit.

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Methane is a major contributor to global warming. Although it remains in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than carbon dioxide, it is 84 times more potent over a 20-year time horizon.

The energy sector represents the second-largest source of methane emissions linked to human activity, after agriculture, and has the biggest potential for reduction, according to analysts.

“If we can’t make real progress in cutting down methane, it is going to be impossible to limit warming to 1.5C,” said McGlade, referring to the most ambitious warming goal in the Paris Agreement.

The IEA estimates that the fossil fuel industry needs to reduce methane emissions 75% by 2030 for the world to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 2050.

But last year methane emissions from fossil fuels remained near a record high first reached in 2019, rising slightly from 2022 to 120 million tonnes, according to the watchdog. The United States and China are by far the largest emitters of the powerful gas from oil and gas operations and the coal sector respectively.

Leaks from old or poorly maintained infrastructure and the practice of flaring – burning of excess gas – at oil and gas wells are the main energy-sector culprits for putting methane in the atmosphere.

Easy-fix

Reining in those emissions does not require rocket science. The IEA says well-known technologies and measures, such as upgraded equipment and more efficient practices, can cut the bulk of methane generated from fossil fuels in a fast and cheap way.

Just less than half of last year’s emissions could have been avoided at no net cost to the producers, with measures paying for themselves thanks to revenues from the additional gas captured. “It was a massive missed opportunity,” McGlade said.

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If this is such a win-win, it begs the question of why fossil fuel producers are not stepping up to the plate. Lack of awareness over the scale of emissions and longer return on investment from plugging leaks are cited in the report as extenuating circumstances.

For Mark Brownstein, methane expert at the Environmental Defense Fund, up until very recently methane had simply been ignored by the global community as a serious threat.

“Aggressive action on methane is long overdue, but we are unfortunately still at a relatively early stage,” he told Climate Home. “Only now we’re starting to see some coordinated action from companies and countries to address this pollutant.”

Raft of pledges

More than 150 countries have signed up to a commitment first announced at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by the end of this decade.

Last year’s Cop28 in Dubai produced a host of new promises. The Global Stocktake assessment of national climate plans called for countries to substantially cut methane emissions. Meanwhile, more than 50 oil and gas companies pledged to speed up emission reduction efforts.

But for Romain Ioualalen from campaign group Oil Change International, the industry’s words only go so far. “The climate arsonists fuelling climate chaos cannot be trusted to put out the fire,” he said. “Government must take action to force the industry to clean up its mess on its way out the door.”

New regulations are now in the pipeline and provide experts with the biggest hope that things will finally move in the right direction.

Rules and satellites

In December 2023, the United States finalised new rules aimed at cracking down on U.S. oil and gas industry releases of methane. These include measures to eliminate routine flaring and force producers to better monitor leaks from equipment. Neighbouring Canada has also announced a new proposal for beefed-up methane-cutting standards.

Across the ocean, the European Union agreed at the end of last year on a new law that will require companies to report emissions, monitor and fix leaks, and limit flaring. Crucially, the rules will also apply to imports of oil, gas and coal into the bloc, effectively forcing overseas producers to improve their standards.

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Alongside policy developments, the ability to track methane emissions is continuously improving – mainly thanks to satellite technologies – leaving polluters with less room to hide.

Advances on this front are expected to continue in 2024. MethaneSAT, a new satellite developed by EDF, was launched into space in early March and will soon provide free, near-real-time access to methane emissions data from wide areas that have so far been overlooked.

“This data will not only assist in the implementation of regulatory requirements, but it will also underpin the commitments made by fossil fuel companies at Cop28,” said Brownstein. “All of this is finally pointing us in the right direction.”

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Beijing is aiming to reduce its energy intensity –  the amount of energy consumed per unit of its gross domestic product – by 2.5% in 2024, according to a government policy work plan published on Tuesday at the opening of the annual National People’s Congress.

The target falls short of the rate of reduction needed to hit a goal of slashing energy intensity by 13.5% in the five years to 2025, energy analysts noted.

China is already lagging way behind that goal. Energy intensity fell by only 2% between 2020 and 2023 as the country powered its economic growth with carbon-intensive sources like coal, recent analysis by the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) found.

‘Admitting defeat’

“China is effectively admitting its failure to fulfill the five-year target,” Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society think-tank, told Climate Home. “This year’s target is even more modest than the average rate of reduction needed, while they should be playing catch up.”

Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society and co-founder of CREA, said that China is “basically admitting defeat” with this “very important metric”.

“The [2.5%] target is completely inadequate to get China back on track towards its 2025 goals,” he added. “It is very alarming that the government is not articulating a plan on how they are going to hit an internationally-pledged target.”

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The energy intensity goal is one of the main climate commitments made by the Chinese government in its current five-year plan and is also referenced in the country’s nationally determined contribution (NDC), submitted to the UN under the Paris Agreement.

China set the target in 2021, but a year later it watered down the rules when it stopped counting energy consumption from renewable sources. “It’s essentially a fossil-fuel intensity target now,” said Myllyvirta.

A similar goal of reducing China’s carbon intensity – CO2 emissions per unit of economic output – by 18% is also at serious risk of being missed unless emissions fall dramatically over the next two years.

Emission cuts vs growth

China is the world’s biggest carbon emitter and juggles its emissions-cutting targets with Beijing’s desire to boost economic growth and maintain energy security.

The Asia Society’s Li said this year’s government work plan “does not really prioritise climate and environmental issues in light of the difficult domestic economic conditions”.

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It does, however, indicate strong support for clean energy, saying the government will “further advance the energy revolution” and “strengthen the construction of large-scale wind power and photovoltaic bases”.

But it also says the government will continue to recognise the role of coal power in its energy system and “increase the exploration and development of oil and gas”, suggesting China is not yet planning to start transitioning away from fossil fuels, as countries agreed to do at Cop28 in December. 

Renewables and coal leader

The country is already both a global leader in renewable energy and a primary backer of coal power.

In 2023 it doubled its solar capacity after installing as many solar panels as the whole world had done in the previous year, according to the International Energy Agency. Wind power capacity also rose by 66% last year.

But it also has more than half of the coal-fired generating capacity operating globally. That is likely to increase as China has more coal power capacity under construction than the rest of the world combined, according to an analysis by the Global Energy Monitor.

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Climate Home analysis shows that renewable energy investments make up four-fifths of all projects seeking a transfer from the old Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to the new system under article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement.

Experts have long written off the vast majority of credits produced from renewable energy as junk because they often already provide the cheapest sources of power in most of the world and selling offsets to fund them does not have any additional impact on emissions.

Some of these projects have also been accused of human rights violations such as forced evictions for the construction of large dams.

Harry Fearnehough from New Climate Institute told Climate Home that “it could definitely undermine the credibility of the mechanism because, while there’s still uncertainty over what it will look like, as a starting point you have a huge supply of low-quality offsets that are potentially available at a very low cost”.

Established in 1997 by the Kyoto Protocol, the UN’s CDM allowed rich countries to meet some of their climate obligations by financing emission-cutting projects in poorer ones.

The programme has received widespread criticism for its patchy human rights record and for failing to deliver promised climate benefits. Supporters of a new mechanism currently being developed under article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement say it is an improved, higher-integrity successor to the CDM.

Winning a lifeline

Countries are still wrangling over many aspects of the future market, but one much-debated issue was settled at Cop26 in Glasgow.

Under pressure from Brazil, Russia, China and India, countries agreed that a vast number of projects originally created under the CDM were allowed to migrate to the new mechanism. This handed them the chance to significantly extend their lifespan and their potential credit sales.

Project developers had until the end of December 2023 to fill in a simple two-page form and submit their transition requests.

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Of the nearly 3,500 eligible projects, over a third (1,284) seized that opportunity.

In total, the projects that have requested transition by the deadline could supply 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon credits between 2021 – the start year for accounting purposes set by the regulation – and 2035, according to a preliminary analysis by NewClimate Institute shared with Climate Home. That is more than the annual CO2 emissions of Germany.

While a relatively small share of the projects opted in, they account for approximately three-quarters of the potential supply of carbon offsets.

That’s because some of the programmes seeking to move could produce an outsized volume of credits. The two biggest ones – a hydro plant and a nitrous oxide emission reduction scheme, both in Brazil – each have the potential to issue around 6 million tons of offsets a year. That’s similar to the annual emissions of Sierra Leone.

Fearnehough says that “very few, if any, of these credits are genuinely likely to be additional”, going beyond what countries would do anyway without the carbon finance.

“A key reason for this is that the CDM was really only scheduled to run up to the end of 2020,” he added. “No investor would have made a decision purely based on expecting revenues from credits in the 2020s because, quite simply, there was no political indication that the possibility to move over to a new mechanism would exist”.

Climate and social concerns

That is particularly true for the renewable energy projects vastly dominating the list. Experts say they are highly likely to fail the additionality test, meaning their credits do not bring any climate benefit. When used to compensate for real emissions elsewhere, they result in more greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere.

The reason is simple. Many renewable offsets came into existence just as solar and wind power were becoming the cheapest source of energy in most countries. After years in operation, they are likely to be profitable from the sale of the electricity alone, without the need for additional revenues from carbon offsetting.

A 2016 study commissioned by the European Commission concluded that the vast majority of these projects “are not providing real, measurable and additional emission reductions”.

The Jirau hydropower plant is located on the Madeira River, in Brazil. Photo: UHE em Jirau/Flickr

Hydropower projects carry even more concerns as their implementation is often marred by human rights problems. Vulnerable communities relying on rivers for their livelihoods are particularly at risk of forced displacement.

The largest project applying for the transition to the new mechanism – the Jirau mega-plant in Brazil’s Rondonia state – is a case in point.

Over the years the project has faced multiple accusations of stoking tensions, pushing indigenous people away from their territories and breaching the rights of the workers that built it. Engie, the project’s developer, previously rejected any accusations.

Other categories of activities featuring prominently on the transition list have raised major concerns in the past.

Credits from projects which claim to cut or stop the emission of industrial gases such as nitrous oxide (N20) and trifluoromethane (HFC-23) were banned by the EU in 2013 for use in its emission trading system.

That’s because, according to studies, they created “a perverse incentive” to increase the production of gases depleting the ozone layer.

Countries’ authorisation dilemma

While the CDM projects have now made their move and requested transition, they are not automatically through to the new system.

Standing in their way is the need to receive a formal authorisation to proceed from the countries where their activities are located. Governments have until 2025 to make a decision and, experts predict, it won’t be a straightforward one.

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“It’s not a guarantee that all host countries will want to approve all of these projects”, according to Jonathan Crook from Carbon Market Watch, who said there would be contrasting forces at play.

“If they authorise them, they have to do corresponding adjustments, which they might not be so keen on since those emission reductions will be deducted from their [NDC climate plans]. But, at the same time, most projects are located in very large countries and it may not make a big difference to their plans”.

The answer to this dilemma will rest primarily in the hands of China, India and Brazil. Between them, the countries host around three-quarters of all projects that are looking to migrate under article 6.4.

Spotlight on three countries

Observers of climate talks said their governments all pushed for rules that would grant a lifeline to as many CDM projects as possible when those negotiations took place at Cop25 in Madrid and Cop26 in Glasgow. But, since then, they have been conspicuously quiet on the topic.

Climate Home approached the respective carbon market authorities in the three countries but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

Trishant Dev is a carbon market expert at the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment. He expects there will be “a lot of pressure on the Indian government to let projects through from the carbon industry, which is thriving in the country”.

But, at the same time, he thinks the government will take time to properly understand all the pros and cons of allowing such authorisations. “It’s a chaotic process. Countries want to make sense of what the final outcome of the article 6 discussions will be and how that will interact with domestic carbon markets they are constructing”, he said.

Who will buy the credits?

Article 6 talks collapsed at Cop28 last December after attempts led by the EU to introduce tighter controls and further integrity safeguards had been rebuffed by the US. Negotiators will try again this year to hammer out a deal on many technical issues that need to be resolved before trading of offsets can begin.

Meanwhile, questions also remain on who will be interested in using those credits, once the market is up and running. Countries, corporations and individuals could all be potential buyers.

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New Climate Institute’s Fearnehough said there doesn’t seem to be much appetite from countries based on what they are saying in public. “But it’s hard to predict what will happen when suddenly the offsets are available and you have an easy option to meet your NDC targets”, he added.

The credits may gain more interest from polluting companies. Banks, airlines and industrial heavyweights keep buying large volumes of questionable renewable energy offsets despite the known concerns, a Bloomberg investigation found. Dressing them up with the UN stamp of approval may add to the appeal.

Carbon Market Watch’s Crook believes much will depend on the transparency of the system – something still largely unknown. “If there is a very transparent register disclosing who purchased how many credits and for what purpose, that would disincentivize companies from transacting low-quality credits out of reputational fears,” he said. “But if it isn’t transparent, buyers may not be as careful with due diligence or may be even encouraged to buy bad credits since there won’t be scrutiny”.

A previous version of this article stated that projects requesting transition could provide 700 million tonnes of credits until 2035, while the correct figure is 1.4 billion tonnes. That was due to a computational error in the model used by NewClimate Institute for their analysis of which we were informed after publication.

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After suffering health problems, 74-year-old Xie Zhenhua Chinese climate envoy resigned earlier this month and will be replaced by foreign ministry diplomat Liu Zhenmin.

The same week this news broke, 80-year-old John Kerry told US President Joe Biden that he would step down as climate envoy in the next few months. He will campaign for Biden to win the presidential election in November. His replacement is unknown.

With the European Union appointing a new top climate diplomat last year and holding elections in June, all three of the world’s biggest polluters will be led by relatively new faces at Cop29 in November.

US-China ties

Xie has led China’s climate diplomacy for most of the period since 2007 while Kerry was heavily involved in climate talks as Barack Obama’s foreign minister and Biden’s climate envoy.

The two have a close personal relationship, shown most recently by Xie bringing his grandchildren to Cop28 in Dubai to sing happy birthday to Kerry. Xie’s return from retirement in 2021 was widely interpreted as a response to Kerry’s appointment.

Xie Zhenhua is a veteran of UN climate talks (Pic: UN Photos)

They have attempted to keep US-China climate talks going despite wider geopolitical tensions, particularly over China’s relationship with Taiwan.

The two sides are now talking about cooperation on issues like methane, clean electricity and urban climate action. But the outcome of US elections later this year could scupper talks.

China’s climate lead

Xie was appointed vice chair of China’s top economic planning body in 2007 and put in charge of climate talks. He was in the post until 2020 when he briefly retired before being re-appointed in 2021.

Former US negotiator Todd Stern described him in 2019 as a  steadfast defender of Chinese interests who was likable, cared about climate change and wanted to get things done.

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Over his tenure, China has become more proactive about wanting to tackle climate change. It has set a net zero goal, established a carbon market, become a renewable energy leader and pledged to stop financing new coal power overseas – although it still plans to build many new coal plants.

Xie oversaw secret work to model different pathways for China to reach net zero emissions – models that eventually informed President Xi Jinping’s aim to reach carbon neutrality by 2060.

He suffered what Kerry called “something of a stroke” in January 2023 which prevented him from working and travelling abroad for much of this year, although he did lead China at Cop28 in Dubai.

The new boss

His replacement Liu previously worked for the United Nations as one of its second-highest ranking officials, focussing on economic and social affairs.

Before that, he was an ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva and then China’s deputy foreign minister and worked on the Paris and Kyoto climate agreements.

Liu Zhenmin poses for his official United Nations portrait (Photos: United Nations)

One China climate watcher, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home that many experts wanted someone from the environment ministry appointed not someone like Liu from the foreign service.

“To oversimplify,” they said, the”[foreign ministry] approaches climate as a card in U.S.-China grand bargain” whereas the “environment [ministry] sees climate change as a real issue that needs to be solved”. The foreign ministry “is known to be conservative and inaccessible”, they added.

On the other hand, the source said that Liu was “probably the most familiar with climate issues in China’s foreign service”.

Chatham House analyst Bernice Lee said, “sure, he is not from the environment ministry but no doubt he will be a fast learner not just in substance but also the building of an international network”. She described him as a “diplomat”, adding “challenging times require someone with diplomatic skills”.

Big hitter gone

After rising up as a Vietnam war veteran, senator and failed presidential candidate, Kerry was appointed as Barack Obama’s secretary of state in 2013.

Kerry worked with Xie to agree on carbon-cutting deals between the two nations which helped land the Paris Agreement in 2015. He went on to sign it with his granddaughter on his lap the next year.

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Kerry left office when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. He came back into the fold immediately after the election of Joe Biden, who chose him as a presidential envoy on climate change. Kerry led the US delegation at Cop26, Cop27 and Cop28.

Jake Schmidt, from the Natural Resources Defence Council, said Kerry “helped rally the world around a commitment to transition away from fossil fuels, speed the growth of clean energy, and begin to mobilise resources to help the world’s most vulnerable nations cope with the consequences of the climate crisis”.

Kerry’s successor is unknown. His two deputies are Rick Duke and Sue Biniaz. If Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November, he is unlikely to appoint a climate envoy.

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The notice, published on Thursday by China’s National Development and Reform Commission, calls for the creation of initial technical standards governing new energy vehicle integration into the grid by 2025.

New energy vehicles will become an important part of the country’s energy storage system by 2030, it said.

As electricity demand surges due to the increasing popularity of new EVs, solutions are being sought by governments and other stakeholders to prevent power networks from being overwhelmed, as millions of people plug in their vehicles for charging at the same time.

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Charging during off-peak hours as well as ‘vehicle-to-grid’ charging – where millions of EV owners could sell their EV batteries’ juice back to grid operators during peak hours – have been seen as potential solutions.

Last year, Brattle Group analyst Ryan Hledik told Climate Home that charging during off-peak hours should make EV use cheaper and therefore more widespread. But he warned that vehicle to grid technology and its business case are still in their infancy.

China is seeking to use these strategies to manage peak power demand through the integration of electric vehicles into the power system, according to the NDRC.

By 2025, NDRC said it would set up over 50 pilot programs in regions where conditions for vehicle-grid integration are relatively mature, including in the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Beijing, Sichuan and Chongqing.

China plans to build over 300 coal-fired power plants. But its government says it does not intend to run all of them at full capacity – instead running them only when needed to top up renewable electricity. So flattening demand peaks will reduce emissions.

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The transition away from fossil fuels to renewables is likely to make the supply of electricity more difficult to control. Power plants can ramp electricity production up and down in a way that solar panels and wind turbines can’t.

So across the world, governments are looking to similar policies to manage the demand for electricity so that it fits more closely with the supply of electricity – known as demand management.

In the Canadian province of Ontario, for example, electricity costs different amounts at different times of the day. This encourages people to use electricity at night when its cheaper.

Similarly in South Africa, the grid operator Eskom incentivises its biggest industrial customers to shift their use of electricity to when its most abundant.

In the US state of Vermont, a utility called Green Mountain Power is deploying Tesla Powerwall batteries to people’s homes.

Most of the year when there’s no shortage of power, residents use this as a backup generator but when there is a shortage the utility uses the electricity for the grid.

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At a meeting of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), China’s board representative Yingzhi Liu objected to six projects because their risk assessments highlighted the potential of forced labour use in the production of solar panels.

The programmes, which included efforts to help vulnerable communities in Sierra Leone, Benin and Laos cope with the impact of climate change, were eventually approved following a majority vote.

China manufactures four-fifths of all the world’s solar panels, having a near-total monopoly over the production of some silicon parts which form the core of solar cells.

Forced labour allegations

Beijing has faced multiple accusations of using forced labour practices in solar panel manufacturing. Concerns have focused particularly on the Xinjiang region, where the Chinese government has committed “serious human rights violations” against the Uyghur population, according to a UN report.

Xinjiang is the source of up to two-fifths of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon, a key raw material in the solar panel supply chain.

In 2021 academics at Sheffield Hallam University said that the biggest polysilicon producers in the region reported their participation in “labour transfer” programmes administered “in an environment of unprecedented coercion”.

The Chinese government disputes the presence of forced labour in its supply chains, arguing that employment is voluntary.

Chinese opposition

At this week’s GCF board meeting, China’s Yingzhi Liu said he opposed “the unsubstantiated allegations of so-called forced labour allegations in the solar supply chains” included in the project documents.

“It is unacceptable to have this sort of presumption of guilt and stigmatisation of the PV [photovoltaic] supply chain”, he added. “Chinese PV should be treated in a fair, just and non-discriminatory manner in GCF projects”.

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None of the project documents seen by Climate Home News mentioned China or Chinese companies directly.

Potential forced labour risks in relation to the supply chains of solar panels featured in the ‘environmental and social action plans’ that accredited entities are required to submit in their funding applications. The assessment allows project developers to rate potential risks and suggest ways to minimise them.

Laos project

Among the proposals the Chinese board member took issues with was a project by Save the Children Australia to strengthen the climate resilience of the health system in Laos, one of Asia’s poorest countries.

The documents submitted to the board said that Save the Children “understands the risk of forced and child labour with procurement of these systems [solar panels]” and will manage the risk through the procurement process.

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Despite regarding the proposal as “good” overall, Liu opposed it for “singling out so-called forced labour” in the solar panel supply chain. The same happened with five more projects.

“They are all good projects with a high impact that will bring benefits,” he added at the end of the session.

Technical requirements

In response to Liu’s remarks, a representative of the GCF told board members that the fund “requires accredited entities to undertake due diligence to make sure there is no forced labour in primary supply chains”, in line with the performance standards set out by the International Finance Corporation – an arm of the World Bank.

The GCF added that all references made to forced labour are “technical” and “have no political dimension”. It also highlighted that the same risk assessments are applied to all supply chains and are not limited to the solar energy sector.

Climate Home found forced labour risks mentioned in projects not involving solar energy submitted to this week’s board meeting.

A proposal to increase climate-friendly rice production in Thailand included forced labour among the potential risks. The project proponents wrote that “although forced labour or child labour is not reported to be a serious problem in rice farming, measures need to be taken to inhibit these practices”. China did not object to that proposal.

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President Xi Jinping said China will “further deepen cooperation” in green infrastructure and energy projects with developing countries as part of a reboot of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Xi unveiled his plans at a glitzy summit celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the infrastructure-focused initiative, which has built power plants, roads, and railways around the world and extended China’s sphere of influence in over a hundred emerging economies.

It has also faced accusations of pushing low-income borrowers into unsustainable debt.

‘Smaller and greener’

The revamp will attempt to breathe new life into the initiative after a lull. Lending levels plummeted over the last couple of years as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and China’s internal economic troubles.

Now Beijing wants to make the Belt and Road smaller and greener, shifting the focus away from colossal and polluting projects and into high-tech and clean energy.

Africa and India push rich nations to phase out fossil fuels faster

Dimitri de Boer, regional director for Asia at ClientEarth, said the summit reinforced the idea that “green is the base colour” of the BRI. “There is a major opportunity here for advancing the global energy transition to mitigate climate change,” he told Climate Home.

Chatham House’s Bernice Lee says the real litmus test is whether the updated Belt and Road can support multiple objectives, beyond simply economic growth. “It is helpful that at a time when so many countries cut their aid spending someone is putting more into the pot, even though the proof is in the pudding as to whether it delivers long-term, lasting benefits”, she added.

The green pivot is not an overnight move and comes two years after Xi pledged China would stop building coal power plants overseas.

Clean energy pivot

Fossil fuel infrastructure had absorbed nearly two-thirds of the energy-related funding committed through the Belt and Road up until then. Dozens of coal plants were built in countries like Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam, locking in carbon-intensive energy production for potentially decades.

According to an analysis by Boston University, Chinese-financed power plants emit more than 245 million tons of CO2 each year – roughly equivalent to Spain’s annual carbon footprint.

Since Xi’s 2021 promise, however, no new coal plants have been developed and investment in renewables has taken off. In the first half of 2023, solar, wind and hydro took up about 55% of energy-related construction and investment facilitated by the Belt and Road, according to Beijing-based Green Finance and Development Centre.

Observers hope the trend will continue, as China pumps cash into its overseas investment programme. Xi said on Wednesday 780 billion yuan ($106 billion) will be made available through Chinese-backed development banks to support Belt and Road projects.

JETP rival

Beijing has also announced the launch of a clean energy initiative seen as China’s response to the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs) struck up by rich Western nations and South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam and Senegal.

Few details about the Green Investment and Finance Partnership (GIFP) have been revealed and no concrete deals have been announced. But Boston University’s Kevin Gallagher, who attended the summit, told Climate Home that the focus will be on “green energy pathways” and not on decommissioning existing fossil fuel plants, like in the Jetp.

Polish election result improves prospects for EU climate ambition

He added the programme will enable partner countries to receive technical assistance on project design and investment from a consortium of participating Chinese financial institutions.

“Beijing’s initiatives are a complement, not an alternative, but hopefully they will spark healthy competition,” said Gallagher. “The JETPs have had trouble getting off the ground and developing countries worry they will accentuate debt burdens. It remains to be seen if GIFPs can be cheaper and faster.”

Vulnerable countries watching

The plans are being watched with interest by emerging and low-income economies that struggle to access the level of finance needed to clean up their energy systems.

Attended by representatives from 130 countries, largely from the Global South, the summit saw repeated appeals from leaders of climate-vulnerable nations for more money to fund climate action.

World Bank approves green reforms, appeals for more money

Sara Jane Ahmed, who represented the V20 coalition of vulnerable nations in Beijing, said the group can work more closely with China through a “green” Belt and Road. “China has launched a program that will truly matter,” she told Climate Home. “What we are seeing more clearly from China is a recognition of collective gains and of shared prosperity aims and this is being driven by technology leaders and long-term partners.”

No talks of ‘climate’

Amid all the green rhetoric, one word remained largely absent from any of the speeches made by the Chinese leadership in relation to finance: climate.

This is no accident, says Li Shuo, global policy advisor for Greepeace East Asia. “China certainly see some of its Belt and Road projects as contributing to the world’s decarbonisation efforts. But it won’t label them as climate finance, so that it is not in any way confused as a potential Chinese contribution to UNFCCC climate finance targets,” he added.

The provision of UN-mandated climate finance has become an increasingly thorny issue. While developed nations have not yet delivered on a pledge to provide $100 billion in climate finance annually by 2020, they are increasingly pushing to expand the donor base beyond historical polluters.

China strongly maintains that it is the responsibility of developed countries to provide climate finance labeled as such.

The post China’s Belt and Road gets ‘green’ reboot and spending boost appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a speech in Beijing today, the veteran negotiator said that “completely eliminating fossil energy is not realistic”, according to a translation provided by the Center for China and Globalization.

He said that renewable energy is dependent on the weather so “fossil fuels should serve as a flexible and back up energy source when technologies such as large-scale energy storage, electric power transmission, smart grids, microgrids are not yet fully mature”.

He added that the emissions which come from burning fossil fuels can be reduced with carbon capture and storage technology.

Sugar rush: how farmers spurred India’s G20 biofuels alliance

This chimes with what Cop28 president Sultan Al-Jaber, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, has said about the world needing to phase out “fossil fuel emissions” rather than fossil fuels themselves.

‘Break the addiction’

But at a climate summit in New York yesterday, UN chief Antonio Guterres had stronger words. “[G20 countries] must break their addiction to fossil fuels, stop new coal, and heed the International Energy Agency’s findings that new oil and gas licensing by them is incompatible with keeping the 1.5 degree limit alive,” he said.

The UN had reserved speaking slots at the summit for those it deemed “first movers and doers”. China – like the US and UK –  did not make the cut.

The head of the European Union Ursula Von Der Leyen said that “other major emitters” needed to match the EU’s ambition to ensure “unabated fossil fuels are phased out well before 2050”.

German leader Olaf Scholz told the room that at Cop28 “it will take strong resolution of us all to phase out fossil fuels – first and foremost coal”.

The prime minister of the Pacific island of Tuvalu Kausea Natano said “there is no bigger threat than fossil fuels”.

At last year’s Cop27 climate talks, a broad coalition of nations pushed for fossil fuel phase-out language in the decision text. They were blocked by oil and gas producers like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia, while China remained silent.

‘First movers’ only: US, China, UK left off UN climate guestlist

At a meeting of the G20 this month, leaders of 20 major economies including China were unable to agree to phase out fossil fuels.

Renewables target

But the G20 did agree to try and triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 and today Xie said he had an “open attitude” towards the goal.

He said it must be “acceptable to all parties, considering different national circumstances and combining qualitative and quantitative aspects”.

He said that a new energy system should be established before the old one is abolished.

Lula scraps Bolsonaro’s cuts to Brazilian climate target ambition

In his speech today, Xie took aim at wealthy countries for failing to deliver the $100 billion a year of climate finance they promised by 2020 which “pertains to the trust between the North and the South”.

Rich nations say they are “confident” of delivering that money this year, although the figures won’t be out until 2025.

Xie said that the loss and damage fund should be set up at Cop28 and there should be arrangements to make sure developed countries meet their target to double finance to help developing countries adapt to climate change.

The post China opposes ‘not realistic’ global fossil fuel phase-out appeared first on Climate Home News.

Since 2013, China has been trying to make cities like Beijing more flood-proof by replacing roads, pavements and rooftops with natural materials like soil that soak up water and by giving more space to water bodies like lakes to absorb stormwater.

But despite these measures, massive amounts of rainfall in recent weeks caused floods which killed at least 33 people, destroyed tens of thousands of homes and shut down the Chinese capital’s second busiest airport.

Experts told Climate Home the flooding shows the limited progress China has made on its plan to invest $1 trillion into sponge cities by 2030 – with the city still largely concrete.

Sponge airport overwhelmed

Even new infrastructure, build with the sponge city concept in mind, could not cope with the rains.

Daxing airport opened a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic. Its builders described it as a “sponge airport” as it was equipped with plants on its roof, a huge wetland and an artificial lake the size of over 1,000 Olympic swimming pools.

Despite these measures, the runways flooded on July 30 and it had to cancel over 50 flights.

Floods engulf Beijing Daxing Airport, halting flightshttps://www.yenisafak.com/en/video-gallery/news/floods-engulf-beijing-daxing-airport-halting-flights-3668129 pic.twitter.com/YabfuQbC9Y

— Yeni Şafak English (@yenisafakEN) August 2, 2023

Waters diverted

The government tried to collect the rain in 155 reservoirs in the Hai River Basin, but the measure proved ineffective in controlling the deluge.

About 50 years ago, the basin –a natural sponge–was locked with embankments and reservoirs to manage the water flow.

In recent years though, these structures have made flooding worse as climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall. These structures lead to overflow, collapse and the authorities have blown them up to ease flooding.

Indonesia delays $20bn green plan

Reuters reported that flood waters locked in reservoirs were diverted to low-lying populated land in Zhuozhuo, a small city around 80km from Beijing, to flush out the stormwater from the country’s national capital.

Residents of Zhuozhou were angry at the government’s response, Reuters reported. The government reacted by shutting down criticism on social media.

More work needed

Experts argued that these problems show that, rather than abandoning the sponge city project, China and Beijing need to double down and make them better.

Kongjian Yu is the founder of Turenscape, a company involved in the project. He said that just “maybe 1% or 10%” of the city has been converted to a sponge city.

The government’s target is 20% by 2030. “We have a long way to go,” he said.

Yu added that sponge cities are worth doing not just because they control floods but for managing droughts and refilling groundwater supplies too.

US sparks controversy by backing oil company’s carbon-sucking plans

Tony Wong, professor of sustainable development at Monash University, said that progress was always going to be slow as “it takes a long time and a lot of money” to convert a city like Beijing, with lots of people and concrete buildings crammed into a small area, into a sponge city.

More work is needed, says Wong, because Beijing and many other cities lack effective urban planning, and there is no provision for a safe channeling of extreme floodwater.

“What the city needs is the inclusion of green corridors, just like Singapore – another high-density city- has done to transport excess stormwater into low-lying areas to prevent loss of lives and property.”

If China pulls this off it could become an example for many developing countries with high-density cities struggling to control urban flooding, added Wong.

The post Devastating Beijing floods test China’s ‘sponge cities’ appeared first on Climate Home News.

China has ramped up its wind and solar manufacturing capabilities in a bid to decarbonise its economy and ease its dependence on coal, and it is now on track to meet its goal to bring total wind and solar capacity to 1,200 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, up from 758 GW at the end of last year.

But as older projects are replaced and decommissioned, waste volumes are set to soar, with large amounts of capacity already approaching retirement age, posing big environmental risks.

To cope with the challenge, China will draw up new industrial standards and rules detailing the proper ways to decommission, dismantle and recycle wind and solar facilities, the National Development and Reform Commission, said on Wednesday.

Indonesia delays $20bn green plan, after split with rich nations on grants and new coal plants

The state planning agency said that China would have a “basically mature” full-process recycling system for wind turbines and solar panels by the end of the decade.

Photovoltaic (PV) panels have a lifespan of around 25 years, and many of China’s projects are already showing significant signs of wear and tear, China’s official Science and Technology Daily newspaper said in June.

The paper cited experts as saying that China would need to recycle 1.5 million metric tons of PV modules by 2030, rising to around 20 million tons in 2050.

The problem of waste from the renewable energy sector has become a growing global concern. Total waste from solar projects alone could reach 212 million tons a year by 2050, according to one scenario drawn up by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) last year.

The post China plans to recycle solar panels and wind turbines appeared first on Climate Home News.

It’s the first time this proposal will be formally discussed at a UN international body.

For the past three weeks, governments gathered in Kingston, Jamaica, at a little-known UN agency called the International Seabed Authority (ISA), to discuss a moratorium on mining on the deep seabed in international waters. No companies are currently carrying out such projects yet.

A coalition of nations pushed for a ban to be placed on the agenda but were opposed by Mexico, Nauru and most persistently by China. Towards the end of the meeting though, they won a concession agreeing that it be put provisonally on the agenda next year.

Greenpeace campaigner Louisa Casson was at the talks and said this was “incredibly exciting” and that deep-sea mining has now become”less likely” while Costa Rica’s negotiator Gina Guillen-Grillo tweeted that there will be a discussion on a temporary ban next year.

Proud of the results of hard work led by likeminded countries with the support of many others,this week at the ISA.
We achieved that next ISA Assembly will have stand alone discussion of General Policy for the application of Precautionary Principle @CRcancilleria pic.twitter.com/YMwA427BSy

— Gina Guillen-Grillo (@GinaGGCR) July 29, 2023

But other environmentalists were less upbeat. Bobbi-Jo Dobush from The Ocean Foundation told Mongabay that China’s blocking of talks on a ban “squandered hours of much needed discussion time” and deep sea scientist Patricia Esquete said the blocking of talks was “very concerning”.

The mining companies claim that minerals like nickel and cobalt are needed in batteries and will help speed up the energy transition but environmental campaigners like Casson dispute this, saying that more mining isn’t necessary and deepsea mining will damage ecosystems we still know little about.

Agenda fight

In Kingston, a coalition of over a dozen countries spearheaded by Chile, France and Costa Rica tried to officially debate for the first time in history the possibility to ban deep-sea mining until its full impact on the ocean’s biodiversity is understood.

Hervè Berville, the French Minister for Marine Affairs, told the Assembly on Wednesday that the world “must not and cannot embark on a new industrial activity without measuring the consequences and taking the risk of irreversible damage”.

The French minister for Marine Affairs speaking at the ISA Assembly. Photo: IISD/ENB | Diego Noguera

But China, Mexico and the Pacific island of Nauru opposed a halt. While Mexico and Nauru relented, China continued to oppose even putting a moratorium on the official agenda saying it was “not suitable” for discussion.

Gina Guillén, head of the Costa Rican delegation said “just one country is opposing [the agenda item on the discussion]. We hope it does happen. One country can’t hijack the most important body of the [ISA] just for being a big economy. That goes against all principles of multilateralism.”

In a bad-tempered last day of talks, China’s negotiator Wenting Zhao defended herself, saying that if the agenda isn’t agreed “everyone will know who is responsible for this”.

France’s negotiator hit back, saying that those “who blame others are the responsible for this situation” and “if there is a responsibility, it is not ours, we have made concessions”.

Brazil seeks European trade advantages in return for Amazon protection

Eventually, governments agreed a compromise. They would not discuss a ban at this meeting but would put a discussion on the provisional agenda next year. This year it was only proposed for the supplementary agenda.

Casson said the discussion “would still need to be adopted by governments so [there] may well be pushback” but she said that moving it from the supplementary agenda to the provisional shows “substantive arguments against it have conceded”.

“This compromise does in effect accept that the ISA Assembly does have the authority to debate the development of a general policy of the ISA, including the possibility of a establishing moratorium on deep-sea mining. So arguably a small step forward but only the beginning of the debate in the Assembly,” Casson explained.

Time pressure

On the other side to Casson is Gerrard Barron, the outspoken CEO of the leading deep sea mining hopeful The Metals Company (TMC). In a statement targetted at investors in his troubled company, he celebrated the ISA’s decision to keep drawing up rules for deep-sea mining.

“It is now a question of when — rather than if — commercial-scale nodule collection will begin”, he said.

The ISA had been pressured into this by the government of Nauru, which is sponsoring TMC. In July 2011, the government of the tiny Pacific nation triggered a mechanism which gave the ISA two years to write up regulations for mining.

That deadline passed this July. Barron said he was “obviously disappointed” that they didn’t finish writing the rules on time but said he believes “the finishing line is within sight”.

But Barron’s investors were less impressed, as TMC’s share price nearly halved between the start of the meeting and its end.

Casson said that the meeting had showed how politically controversial deep sea mining had become and that, as it needs to be signed off by governments at the ISA, it was unlikely to start soon.

Critical minerals

The International Energy Agency has warned that there are likely to be shortages in minerals like lithium, cobalt and nickel which will hold back the energy transition.

But, with more investment in mining on land, the IEA’s fears are easing and Casson said that companies like Tesla are cuttinb back on the amount of these minerals they use.

Germany plans to keep funding new gas projects overseas despite pledge

Casson said that these minerals and batteries should be recylcled “rather than looking to repeat the problems of mining on land in the ocean”.

The ISA’s power only covers parts of the sea which are more than 200 miles from the coast and more than 200 metres deep.

Mining on the seabed closer to the coast is allowed under international rules but no government has started doing it yet.

The Norwegian government has proposed mining its northern waters and will put their proposals to parliament this autumn.

The post Deep-sea mining ban draws closer despite China’s opposition appeared first on Climate Home News.

Kerry spoke late into the night with his counterpart Xie Zhenhua and, in a sign of warming relations, met with China’s second most-powerful man Premier Li Qiang and foreign minister Wang Yi.

With the broader US-China relationship hostile, expectations were low but experts cautiously hailed the visit as a success.

Greenpeace East Asia analyst Li Shuo called it “an important step in what will be a complex rescue operation” while the Asia Society’s Thom Woodroofe called it a “small win”.

Pleased to host a dinner for China Special Envoy for Climate Change Xie Zhenhua and Secretary John Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, as we seek to deepen our joint work on the climate crisis. @ClimateEnvoy pic.twitter.com/LUt0d3VNCz

— Ambassador Nicholas Burns (@USAmbChina) July 19, 2023

While officials met in Beijing, China was going through a record-breaking heatwave; one of several impacting the northern hemisphere at the moment. Some locations in the country’s arid Northwest recorded temperatures as high as 52C (125,96F).

Heatwaves have become more intense in recent decades as a result of the climate crisis, especially in cities, according to a report by the UN panel of climate scientists.

Now, both the US and China are planning two more meetings before Cop28 in November. They will talk about topics like better integrating China’s booming renewable sector into its coal-dominated electric grid and tackling methane emissions.

But the Chinese government warned that tensions over Taiwan could still scupper the talks. Chinese state media said that climate talks “cannot be separated from the overall environment of Sino-U.S. relations” and that the US should “properly handle the Taiwan issue”.

UAE’s Cop28 president plans “brutally honest” climate summit

Coal to renewables

After the first day of talks, Kerry highlighted “the challenges of coal and methane pollution” as the priorities for joint climate action.

In a press conference at the end of his visit, he praised China’s growth in renewable capacity but said that the US believes China has more coal power plants than it needs.

The two sides will discuss “scaling and integrating of renewable energy into the power sector in order to be able to reduce coal emissions”, he said.

China is rolling out renewables rapidly. This year, China will install more solar power than the US has installed in its history.

But the share of China’s electricity which is provided by these renewables is growing much slower because of unfinished paperwork and bureaucracy.

Since US president Joe Biden’s election, the US has prioritised measures to tackle methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas which is emitted from fossil fuel infrastructure, farms and landfills.

China has not joined US and EU-led schemes to reduce methane emission. The government has long been drafting its own methane reduction strategy but it has yet to be released.

Kerry said that including methane in climate efforts would be a subject of further discussions.

US ban on Chinese panels

For the Chinese side, a priority is for the US to overturn its tariffs on Chinese solar panels, which have harmed the roll-out of solar energy in the USA.

Kerry rejects “climate reparations” but praises loss and damage fund

Kerry told a reporter from state-owned China Central Television that the subject “was raised with me” and that he would pass that concern on to the relevant ministers.

A state media report of Kerry’s meeting with Li Qiang said that developed countries like the US “should take the lead in reducing emissions and fulfill their financial commitments as soon as possible”.

Rich nations have collectively failed to honour their promise to give developing countries $100 billion a year to fund climate projects by 2020, with the US largely responsible for that failure.

Rocky few years

US president Joe Biden appointed Kerry as his climate envoy shortly after he was elected in November 2020. Three months later, China’s president Xi Jinping brought Zhenhua out of retirement to be his climate envoy.

The appointments were seen as a boost to the chances that the two sides could work together on climate change, as they did under the Obama administration to bring about the Paris agreement in 2015, due to the two men’s long and friendly relationship.

After dozens of virtual and several in-person meetings, these hopes were further boosted at the end of 2021 when the two sides announced a joint agreement on climate at the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow. Both sides committed to discuss measures to reduce methane emissions.

Powerful officials and experts from both countries were supposed to begin discussions on issues such as clean electricity, the circular economy and city climate action, as well as methane, in September 2022.

But in August 2022, the head of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi went on an official visit to Taiwan, an island nation off China’s east coast that the Chinese government considers part of China.

Nancy Pelosi walks with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen (Photo: Makoto Lin/Taiwan President’s office)

China reacted by cancelling the climate talks, a move Kerry called “both disappointing and misguided”. Instead of cooperating, official from both sides engaged in public Twitter spats over their climate records.

A few months later in November, tensions cooled after Biden and Xi had a productive meeting on the sidelines of the G20 in Indonesia. They agreed to work together on climate change and their climate teams, both of which were at Cop27 in Egypt at the time, were allowed to talk formally again.

After that meeting, the US announced that its top foreign affairs official Anthony Blinken would visit China. That trip was cancelled when the US military shot down a Chinese balloon in US airspace in February but was eventually held in June, paving the way for Kerry’s visit.

EU to push for fossil fuel phaseout ‘well ahead of 2050’ at Cop28

Tension lingers

But Kerry’s visit wasn’t free from conflict. On Sunday, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that China is not a developing nation and the world should “pressure China to take far more dramatic action to reduce its emissions”.

Today China’s president Xi Jinping told a conference that, while China has an “unsweving” commitment to its climate targets “the path towards the goals as well as the manner, pace and intensity of efforts to achieve them should and must be determined by the country itself, rather than swayed by others”.

Chatham House researcher Bernice Lee told Climate Home that the US and China are both keen not to be seen to concede anything to the other side.

But Lee added that Xi’s speech is a positive signal to local governments and officials in China that the central government is committed to the targets.

“Given domestic political conditions on both sides,” she said, “moving or leading ‘together but separately’ is the only way for the two powers to move forward on the climate action agenda.”

The post Under record heatwave, US and China “unstick” climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

Images of her have been doctored to appear to show her gaining weight and posts asserted she castigated the Chinese people for using chopsticks for apparently environmental reasons. 

Social media posts altered an image of Greta Thunberg to imply she had put on weight. The real image is on the right. (Photo: Annie Lab)

These claims have been debunked time and time again. At Annie Lab, our fact-checking project at the University of Hong Kong, we tried to set the record straight about the manipulated images in 2021 and 2022.  

These fraudulent posts against Thunberg may seem harmless. But our research has traced it back to a wider narrative, one that is seen as retaliation for her perceived “attacks” on China. 

In May 2021, Thunberg tweeted that China, while categorised as a developing nation, still emits a lot of greenhouse gases. “We can’t solve the climate crisis unless China drastically changes course,” she said.  

This spurred heated reactions from China Daily’s EU bureau chief Chen Weihua, who tweeted back to Thunberg that she was barking up the wrong tree because developed countries are the biggest historical emitters. 

Your PR team should educate u more. 1. China’s pop is 2xOECD, so per capita emission much lower. 2. OECD countries have relocated much pollution/emission industries to China/other developing nations. So don’t pretend you’re innocent. 3. OECD by far the largest historical emitter.

— Chen Weihua （陈卫华） (@chenweihua) May 8, 2021

Thunberg was then labelled a “puppet of Western politicians” and a “selective environmentalist” by Chinese netizens who claimed that, although she spoke about China’s carbon footprint, she did not discuss Japan’s plan to release nuclear wastewater into the Pacific. In reality, Thunberg did share this latter news on Twitter. 

The slew of misleading posts against Thunberg is just one example of how climate misinformation has evolved in China.  

More than a decade ago, climate change was framed as a Western hoax by popular TV host Larry Lang Hsien-ping, host of the evening show Larry’s Eyes on Finance, who said in a 2010 episode that Western countries “manufactured the climate myth without any scientific integrity”.  

This belief was echoed in some Chinese books published between 2009 and 2011. However, these books “disappeared” after 2011, in common with public statements made by prominent figures like Lang.  

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Climate journalist Geoff Dembicki has linked this to a number of factors, including a 2012 survey showing 93% of Chinese people believed climate change is happening and the government tackling climate change head-on. 

However, climate misinformation in China’s digital sphere is still very much alive. For our report, we collected over 100 misleading posts on Chinese social media platforms including Weibo, Douyin and Baidu between September 2022 and April 2023. 

We also looked into platforms outside the country’s ‘Great Firewall’ such as YouTube, Twitter, Rumble, Bitchute, as well as news outlets like The Epoch Times, a far-right publication linked to Falun Gong, a religious sect banned in China. 

Although China is now seen as a green technology hub, we found Chinese social media posts, particularly on Twitter, sharing unverified videos supposedly showing Beijing’s shoddy products such as e-vehicles bursting into flames and wind turbines breaking.  

Social media posts falsely claimed that electric vehicles were catching fire (Photo: Annie Lab)

While we were not able to definitively determine the motivations behind these posts attacking China’s low-carbon initiatives, we can say that they indicate divergence and dissonance in political viewpoints.  

A more pronounced and direct example is the perpetuation of debunked claims about climate science by The Epoch Times in an attempt to show that climate change is an agenda pushed by China for its own benefit. 

Another narrative we found claimed that rising temperatures would make parts of mainland China prosperous again, referencing the experiences of Han and Tang Dynasty. This, however, has been debunked by experts from Chinese government agencies themselves.  

China Environment News, the official publication of China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, quoted Zhang Chengyi, a researcher at the China Meteorological Administration’s National Climate Center in its fact-check on the topic. Zheng said rising temperature is not the only factor behind changes in rainfall, an explanation which addresses beliefs that increased warming will lead to more precipitation in arid areas in northwestern China.  

The Overshoot Commission is talking about solar geoengineering. Not everyone thinks it should

The China Environment News article also pointed out that the belief that “the most prosperous era in Chinese history was in the warm period”, was mainly based on the preliminary research of Zhu Kezhen, China’s foremost meteorologist. His work made the same observations, but it overlooked other contributing factors such as political, economic, diplomatic and social conditions.  

We also found narratives that undermined the human contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and pointed to other causes, such as solar activity and volcanic eruption. There were posts alleging that climate change is part of a natural cycle and that the world is entering an ice age soon.  

China has sought to address this kind of misinformation. China Youth Daily, quoting experts from China’s space weather forecasting station, debunked a claim about solar activity supposedly causing extreme weather events. 

Rich world’s leaders fail to commit to Paris global financing summit

The above examples show China’s conscious efforts to correct some narratives of climate misinformation.  

But when it comes to climate misinformation that has a patently more political aspect or is viewed as attacking China’s identity, clarificatory statements from the state are far from robust. Official attempts to quell misleading posts against Thunberg, for example, are not as evident.  

Annie Lab tried as much as possible to capture this tension and idiosyncrasy in China’s climate misinformation, a tension that is only expected to evolve and, unlike books, not disappear anytime soon.  

Purple Romero is a supervising editor at Annie Lab, a fact-checking project based at the University of Hong Kong

The post China is quick to combat social media’s climate lies – but not when they are about their critics appeared first on Climate Home News.

But since then, it’s all gone quiet. We looked into why and the answers are personal and geopolitical.

The two sides’ climate relationship is heavily reliant on the personal relationship of their climate envoys, John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua.

They’re both in their seventies and climate diplomacy is hard work.

A month after Kerry caught Covid at Cop27, Xie suffered what Kerry described as  “something of a stroke”, leaving him incapacitated for weeks and unable to travel abroad ever since.

Then there was the Chinese spy balloon scandal and the visit of Taiwan’s president to California to meet Congressional leader Kevin McCarthy.

But the relationship seems to have survived as Kerry has been invited to China for climate talks. Formal cooperation on methane emissions, the energy transition and saving forests could follow.

This week’s news: 

• Exxon scrambles to save investments before Colombia bans fracking
• What is the global stocktake of climate action and why does it matter?
• Mitsubishi bets on carbon removal while keeping coal plants
• Comment: Reporting on climate adaptation is a mess – here’s how to fix it
• Despite Taiwan and spy balloon tensions, China invites US for climate talks
• US solar boom on hold as industry awaits subsidy rules

Kerry and an unconfirmed Chinese representative will join 38 other ministers in Berlin on Tuesday, as the climate circus comes to town for the annual Petersberg climate dialogue.

After the opening speeches, in which the UAE’s Sultan Al-Jaber will lay out his vision for Cop28, the government officials will sit in circles around flip charts to talk.

That health-check on progress since the Paris Agreement was signed will dominate climate talks to Cop28 and beyond so we’ve published a handy explainer.

You can watch all the public parts here with opening speeches at 10.30am German time on Tuesday and a closing press conference at 1.45pm on Wednesday followed by words from German leader Olaf Scholz.

The post Climate Weekly – US-China talks stall but survive appeared first on Climate Home News.

The two veteran diplomats spoke virtually last week as the US hosted the Major Economies Forum on climate. During this talk,  Xie issued an invitation to Kerry, the former US secretary of state told Foreign Policy magazine.

“My hope is that out of these discussions we get back to where we were two years ago because we must be able too cooperate together on this issue”, Kerry said.

US pledges $1 billion to Green Climate Fund amid call to keep 1.5C in reach

While US president Joe Biden’s government has tried to keep climate talks separate to the broader US-China relationship, issues such as the independence of Taiwan and the recent Chinese spy balloon scandal have prevented the two sides from engaging meaningfully on climate change.

Health issues have also hindered progress, with Kerry telling Foreign Policy magazine that Xie suffered “something of a stroke” in January which prevented him from working for “a month and a half or so”. Xie has not made any foreign trips since and his participation in November’s Cop28 climate talks is in doubt.

Early promise

Biden appointed Kerry as his climate envoy shortly after he was elected in November 2020. Three months later, China’s president Xi Jinping brought Zhenhua out of retirement to be his climate envoy.

The appointments were seen as a boost to the chances that the two sides could work together on climate change, as they did under the Obama administration to bring about the Paris agreement in 2015, due to the two men’s long and friendly relationship.

UN: World set to blow through 1.5C carbon budget in 10 years

After dozens of virtual and several in-person meetings, these hopes were further boosted at the end of 2021 when the two sides announced a joint agreement on climate at the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow. Both sides committed to discuss measures to reduce methane emissions.

Powerful officials and experts from both countries were supposed to begin discussions on issues such as clean electricity, the circular economy and city climate action, as well as methane, in September 2022.

Pelosi triggers breakdown

But in August 2022, the head of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi went on an official visit to Taiwan, an island nation off China’s east coast that the Chinese government considers part of China.

China reacted by cancelling the climate talks, a move Kerry called “both disappointing and misguided”. Instead of cooperating, official from both sides engaged in public Twitter spats over their climate records.

Nancy Pelosi walks with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen (Photo: Makoto Lin/Taiwan President’s office)

A few months later in November, tensions cooled after Biden and Xi had a productive meeting on the sidelines of the G20 in Indonesia. They agreed to work together on climate change and their climate teams, both of which were at Cop27 in Egypt at the time, were allowed to talk formally again.

After that meeting, the US announced that its top foreign affairs official Anthony Blinken would visit China. But that trip was cancelled when the US military shot down a Chinese balloon in US airspace in February.

McCarthy compromises

Then in April, Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-Wen visited the US and met with Pelosi’s successor as leader of the US House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy.

According to Thom Woodroofe, senior fellow of the Asia Society Policy Institute and a former climate diplomat, the meeting was made less provocative to China because it was held in McCarthy’s home state of California rather than in the US Congress or in Taiwan.

The US government downplayed this trip by calling it a mere “transit stop” on Tsai’s way to the Caribbean.

Despite these setbacks, Kerry told Foreign Policy last week that the two sides are “back in the place where we are hopefully able to move forward”. But, he added, “it’s purely speculative at this point”.

If they did meet, Kerry said they would work together on reducing methane emissions, the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables, and stopping forests from being destroyed.

US solar boom on hold as industry awaits subsidy rules

Compared to geopolitics, intellectual property and other controversies, climate is considered a relatively easy issue for the two sides to discuss.

Greenpeace East Asia advisor Li Shuo told Climate Home: “If both countries can’t talk on such an issue with shared interest then I don’t know what else is there for the bilateral relationship.”

Woodroofe said that, if the US and China are going to cooperate, it has to be now. Kerry has talked about retiring soon, Xie is unwell and there may be a Republican in the White House next year, he noted.

“Diplomacy is all about personalities and people,” said Woodroofe. “The fact is we have the two elder statesmen – who both have the cache to achieve outcomes – it’s a really rare and significant situation that can achieve progress”.

“If not them now, then who?” he asked.

The post Despite Taiwan and spy balloon tensions, China invites US for climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

They can make a significant contribution to global efforts to address the climate crisis – if their rights are protected.

The Green Climate Fund – the UN’s flagship climate fund – is being put to the test to heed this call.

Indigenous representatives have complained that one of the fund’s projects in Nicaragua risks fuelling escalating violence from settlers invading their land to farm cattle and exploit the forest’s resources. They say the GCF approved the project without their consent or due diligence.

Last week, armed settlers reportedly attacked two communities and killed at least five people. The Nicaraguan government has turned a blind eye.

This is the first complaint case to reach the GCF board and a test of the fund’s ability to enforce its own safeguards.

Because of its sensitivity, board members discussed the case behind closed doors at a meeting this week. But the meeting drew to a close Thursday without a public outcome to the growing frustration of civil society groups. Meanwhile, the violence continues.

Also this week, Mafalda Duarte was selected to take the reins of the GCF’s secretariat from French UN veteran Yannick Glemarec. As CEO of the Climate Investment Funds, Duarte has launched programmes that provide direct financing for indigenous communities to protect natural resources.

Perhaps, these are some of the skills she can bring to the GCF.

This week’s stories

• Green Climate Fund credibility hangs over response to violence in Nicaragua project
• Loss and damage committee ready to start talks following Asian nominations
• Argentina secures funding boost to kickstart gas exports from ‘carbon bomb’
• IMF approves first batch of climate resilience loans
• Lawyers and activists build pressure on Korean court to rule on climate
• Chinese coal boom a ‘direct threat’ to 1.5C goal, analysts warn
• Mafalda Duarte named as next chief of UN climate fund
• Vietnam’s energy transition deal is a ‘black box’, partner warns

The expansion of fossil fuel production continues to cause significant harm to indigenous peoples around the world.

In Argentina, campaigners say president Alberto Fernández’s plans to export record amounts of gas from the Vaca Muerta fields will further trample the rights of indigenous Mapuche people.

The Latin American Development Bank recently agreed to support the Néstor Kirchner pipeline, which will channel gas to Argentina’s northern Santa Fé province for export to neighbouring countries. Fernández is also eyeing exports to Europe amid plans to build an LNG terminal in Buenos Aires.

This fossil fuel buildout and a renewed coal boom in China risks pushing the world towards more violent climate disasters. As Malawi reels from what could be the longest-lasting tropical storm on record, we are once again reminded that the most vulnerable will suffer first.

The post Nature’s stewards under attack – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

Concerns were raised because Beijing rapidly accelerated plans for new coal power plants in the second half of last year in a bid to increase its energy security.

According to a report by think-tank E3G, published today, China’s coal project pipeline grew by nearly 50% in the last six months of 2022 taking the total to 250GW. It says developments in China diverge sharply from the rest of the world, where combined coal power plans shrank to 97GW over the same period – the lowest level in modern history.

China is still a global leader in the rollout of renewable energy. The country is adding clean energy projects to the grid almost as fast as the rest of the world combined.

But Leo Roberts from E3G’s coal transition programme believes China’s coal expansion is a “direct threat” to the Paris Agreement goal.

Increasing scale of the challenge

In 2015, nations agreed to pursue efforts to limit global temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Crossing that threshold would make climate impacts increasingly harmful to people and the entire planet.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says no new unabated coal-fired power stations can be built if the world wants to reach that goal.

“Every new coal power station that comes online increases the scale of the challenge to decarbonise the global economy,” Roberts told Climate Home News. “China’s coal boom is actually undermining significant progress away from coal in all other parts of the world.”

The rapid expansion of China’s coal power plans comes as Beijing seeks to strengthen its energy security. Geopolitical tensions affecting global energy prices and domestic supply issues have made policymakers reconsider previous intentions.

After blackouts, China’s green goals take back seat to energy security

At a climate summit in April 2021, China’s president Xi Jinping vowed the country would “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects, and strictly limit the increase in coal consumption”.

At the time his words mirrored the central government’s successful attempts to curb new coal projects. E3G analysis shows that new coal power proposals in China collapsed by 75% between 2015 and July 2022.

China’s rapid U-turn

The recent coal boom has reversed this trend and China is now a clear international outlier. It currently accounts for 72% of total global planned coal capacity, with India, Turkey and Indonesia following far behind.

The aim of China’s coal push is to prevent a repeat of the power outages that affected homes and industries last year. Heatwaves increased electricity demand for cooling, while drying up water reservoirs necessary for hydropower generation in the country’s southwestern provinces.

Meteorological agencies predict another round of record high temperatures and more droughts this year.

Preventing power outages

Many of the new coal-fired power plants are expected to meet peak summer demand driven by energy-hungry air conditioners, which last year resulted in the highest recorded momentary load.

Lauri Myllyvirta, a lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), says solar energy is able to tackle daytime power needs, but meeting night-time peak demand requires a more nuanced approach.

Still, he believes betting on coal is a suboptimal and costly strategy. “Building coal power capacity to cover peak demand just some days or weeks per year is very expensive. There is still a lot of potential to deal with peak loads with better grid management."

E3G’s Roberts said it looks as if the Chinese government’s claim that it is new building coal capacity to support peak demand is being used as a cover to push through projects. “The reality is that most of the permits handed to new coal power stations would allow them to provide baseload power, which slows down the transition from coal-to-clean."

The post Chinese coal boom a ‘direct threat’ to 1.5C goal, analysts warn appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a significant legal intervention, the Supreme People’s Court issued new guidelines that say judges should balance development and corporate emission reduction when ruling on lawsuits.

The 24-article document gives courts across China the green light to hear cases related to energy conservation and emission reduction, low-carbon technology, carbon trading and green finance, and to promote climate change mitigation and adaptation.

It sets out 11 examples of climate-related lawsuits that judges might encounter, including contractual issues, implementation of carbon emission quotas, air pollution liability and deforestation. The document says courts should focus on the carbon trading market, in particular, which has been the subject of a wide variety of legal disputes in recent years.

China warns of more floods and heatwaves in 2023

Liu Zhumei, chief environmental judge at the Supreme People’s Court adjudication tribunal for environment and resources, told media that the new guidelines are a key step to implementing environmental protection pledges in the report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

This promised to boost low-carbon industries and improve the system for market-based allocation of resources, as well as reduce environmental harms.

“The guideline is also the first judicial document made by the top court to regulate case handling on the carbon peak and carbon,” she added.

‘Dual carbon’ goals

President Xi Jinping recently reaffirmed a pledge that China would peak its carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and be carbon neutral before 2060, known as the “dual carbon” goals.

But experts say decarbonising the country will be a major challenge.

A recent report by Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found permit approval, construction and new project announcements for coal in China accelerated “dramatically” last year, with new permits reaching the highest level since 2015. Coal power capacity starting construction in China was six times bigger than all the rest of the world combined.

Central government appears to be supportive of the new projects, the report finds, with the energy regulator aiming to have 165GW of coal power construction starting in 2022-23. Chinese provinces too are expected to focus their energies on a mix of both coal and renewable power in the coming year.

Japan’s ‘green transformation’ would derail the energy transition in Asia

China signalled the continued importance of coal to its domestic energy security in a government work report presented at the beginning of the National People’s Congress annual meeting on Sunday.

However, minister of ecology and environment Huang Runqiu also recently said the development of industries with high energy consumption and emissions, projects in areas with fragile ecosystems and the transfer of projects with high emissions from eastern China to the west of the country would be “highly restricted”, according to China Daily.

Whether the judiciary can temper the country’s coal drive remains to be seen.

Dimitri de Boer, Asia regional director of programmes for environmental law NGO ClientEarth, told Climate Home that the involvement of courts in implementing the dual carbon goals would likely “increase the level of scrutiny on newly proposed high emissions projects, and help to ensure a smooth low-carbon energy transition”.

Proactive role

Climate litigation has been difficult in China because, unlike many other countries, it does not have specific legislation to combat climate change. But the judiciary has signalled a willingness to engage with the issue.

The 2021 Kunming Declaration called on courts to play a proactive role in tackling climate change and encouraged greater coordination of domestic and foreign rule of law.

A judgment on cryptocurrency mining last year was the first time a ruling of final effect explicitly mentioned China’s carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, and experts think it is unlikely to be the last.

Lu Xu, senior lecturer in property law at Lancaster University’s law school, said the new guidelines largely summarised what the judicial system in China was already doing but do send a strong signal to the lower courts.

“Guidelines are not law,” he said. “But lower courts will understandably pay attention to all of them. In turn this will create pressure on litigants to accept or accommodate the values of the guidelines, as lower courts would not want to decide cases in blatant defiance to them.”

The post China strengthens role of courts in meeting carbon targets appeared first on Climate Home News.

But an undecided growth model, emphasis on energy security and rising geopolitical tensions are expected to pose challenges to its decarbonisation process, they said.

While some experts hoped that China would peak its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the next five years, others considered the nation’s overall emissions trajectory “more uncertain” due to the unpredictability of its growth model.

Xi cements control

On Sunday, Xi became the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party – the highest position in the country’s ruling political party – for the third consecutive time. He will lead the party until 2027.

Over the past two years, climate action has played an important role in Xi’s leadership.

In September 2020, he pledged that China would peak its carbon dioxide emissions “before 2030” and achieve carbon neutrality “before 2060”. He is believed to have personally promoted these two targets, which are known as the “dual carbon” goals.

At the congress last week, he reiterated these goals in a lengthy speech setting out the party’s priorities for the next five years. The goals also appeared in an accompanying 25-page report.

Kevin Mo is the principal of Beijing-based green consultancy iGDP. He said that, while none of the instructions were new, their incorporation into the report brought a new level of significance to China’s climate agenda and was “a very important” step in the nation’s political system.

Emissions peak

Wu Changhua, regional director at the office of green activist Jeremy Rifkin, told Climate Home that she would be watching China’s emissions-peaking timeline.

“Although China has said it would peak its emissions ‘before 2030’, it has never clarified how much ‘before’ the peaking would be or at what level the emissions would top out,” said Wu.

In March, a study from the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) projected that China would peak its CO2 emissions “around 2027” at “about 12.2 gigatonnes”. The IEA estimates that emissions were 11.9 gigatonnes in 2021. However, it remains unclear if CAE’s projection had considered the impact of China’s recent focus on energy security.

Wu said this peaking timeline is “hopeful” but she warned that, since Xi made its “dual-carbon” goals in 2020, China’s “internal and external conditions” – such as its domestic economy and international relations – have both changed “dramatically”, leading to challenges for its climate pledges.

She will also look at how China pushes its clean energy transition, develops a “new energy system” and expands the national carbon market. All of these were mentioned in Xi’s latest speech.

On clean energy, Wu said that China has “made the case” of exceeding its announced targets “in many ways”, such as scaling renewable energy and putting electric vehicles on the road.

For example, projections have shown that the combined installation capacity of China’s wind and solar would exceed 1,100GW by 2025 if their expansion sticks to the current pace. The figure is far ahead of China’s current announced target of “over” 1,200GW by 2030.

“How much more the country would be able to beat the targets for 2025 and 2030 would be some of the major milestones under Xi’s leadership,” she said.

Clean or dirty growth?

But E3G advisor Byford Tsang said China’s emissions trajectory for the next five years is “more uncertain”. He said emissions could “go up or down” depending on the country’s economic strategy.

On Monday, the Chinese government reported 3.9% year-on-year economic growth in the third quarter of this year, which outstripped the forecast of 3.2-3.3%. However, economists warn that longer-term growth will be challenged by Covid-19 curbs, a prolonged property slump and the risk of a global recession.

“If China decides to boost the economy the traditional way, with investments that stimulate infrastructure sectors, it would mean that emissions could go up,” Tsang said. “But if we see more radical policies that could lead to an economic slowdown, like [what happened to] the real estate sector, for example, then we may see emissions going down.”

Edmund Downie, a Princeton international affairs PhD student, said: “A lot of the hopes and challenges for China’s climate transition over the next five years are, in many ways, tied up with the hopes and challenges for China’s economy over the next five years.”

He said “there are real hopes” for the country to peak its CO2 emissions before the end of Xi’s third term in 2027. But “the hard question” is whether China could transition its economy past its reliance on real estate, which supports high-emitting sectors like cement and steel, to a low-carbon model.

Emphasis on energy security

China’s energy security policy adds to the uncertainties for its climate agenda under Xi’s third term, experts said. As China has abundant supplies of coal, energy security is often tied up with the fuel.

Mo said: “It is still to be observed if coal would be used as a short-term measure to ensure energy security or a long-term, basic source of energy.”

He said it is unlikely that coal would be “abandoned completely” in the short term and, even in the long run, weaning the country off the fuel would be difficult.

“Therefore, the ‘clean’ use of coal, with technologies such as carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), has been highlighted,” Mo said. He expects coal to continue to be China’s main source of energy in the next five years, based on his understanding of Xi’s latest speech.

Besides China’s domestic economy and fossil fuel policy, international geopolitics will likely bring more hurdles for its climate agenda. Technology sharing, global supply chains and cross-border trade will be particularly difficult.

Geopolitical breakdown

The US-China geopolitical contention “continues to escalate”, said Wu. She added: “Each has become the biggest security threat to the other. Each has adopted a national strategic shift to enhance its own resilience.”

Mo expects geopolitics to pose “quite a big challenge” to China’s fight against climate change in the coming years. He said other countries used to view climate change as an area in which they could cooperate with China, “but right now, in fact, competition has emerged in climate change… and it is expected to get more fierce”.

On the bright side, E3G climate diplomacy researcher Belinda Schäpe said adapting to climate change has “really gained importance” in China. She said the government’s new adaptation strategy is “much more ambitious” than the previous version.

She expects these improvements to continue, especially after China experienced the “longest and strongest heat wave on record” this summer.

The post As Xi reaffirms climate goals, China faces economic and geopolitical headwinds appeared first on Climate Home News.

The 15 creatures trekked for more than 500 kilometres from March 2020 to September 2021, giving birth to two calves along the way.

On social media, their images and videos went viral. Users romanticized their ordeal and gushed over the “cute” explorers. Reporters framed the unusual dispersal as a mystery.

“These wandering elephants may look cute, but they were in a complex situation,” says Jack O’Connor, lead author of the UN University’s second Interconnected Disaster Risks report. It elaborates on the crisis behind their unusual journey.

The report released on Wednesday lists 10 disasters including Taiwan drought, vanishing vaquita and Tonga eruption, to explain how the root causes are connected and explore solutions.

In the case of the wandering elephants, they identified gaps in conservation and biodiversity practices region and globally, says O’Connor. “Maximizing the number of animals without the right conservation approach triggered human-animal conflict and crisis inside the reserve.”

More elephants, less habitat

The elephants’ journey began in their natural habitat at Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve in Yunnan, southern China.

In March 2020, the reserve was facing extreme drought, possibly causing food and water shortages for elephants. The country’s conservation policies focused on boosting the elephant population inside the reserve, which ballooned from 100 in the 1970s to around 300 in 2020.

But their habitat in southern China kept shrinking. Elephants lost 62% of the areas in just three decades due to expanding human settlements and rubber or tea plantations. As a result, they were left with less than 4% of the reserve’s area remaining suitable for their habitat, says the report.

The crisis had been showing its impact for more than two decades, with human-animal conflict intensifying. Since 1991, more than 60 people have been killed during encounters with Asian elephants in Xishuangbanna, with 12 deaths recorded in 2019 alone.

“Some stretches inside the reserve were growing into a state that was fairly densely packed with trees. Elephants couldn’t use this area because they were not able to cross through them,” says O’Connor. “The conservation approach is too simplistic and based on quantity rather than quality.”

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Another herd from the same reserve wandered towards a botanical garden, miles away from the urban areas, at around the same time. Their adventure got less public attention.

Two herds of elephants escaping the reserve underlined the dire situation, says conservationist Becky Shu Chen. For many Chinese people, it was the first time they had come into contact with these giant animals.

“Culturally, wildlife, in general, is romanticised and personified, but genuine awe and comprehension of the wildness of nature are missing in China,” she adds.

Long road to Cop15

Such romanticising of wild animals is promoted by the Chinese government. In Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, visitors can cuddle a panda, a vulnerable animal that came close to extinction a few decades back. At Harbin Siberian Tiger Park, tourists can feed the tigers – to the extent that the big cats became obese.

Tourists are rarely told about the threats these iconic animals face, or what they can do to help.

“My doctoral program about conservation communication shows that the most awareness-raising campaigns only provide information and don’t lead to any doable action,” says Shu Chen.

The elephants ended up in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. Ironically, this is where ministers met on 12-13 October 2021 and agreed to develop an international deal to reverse biodiversity loss. The summit’s venue displayed a sculpture of 15 wandering elephants, to represent what they were trying to protect.

Yet talks on the nature pact have been repeatedly postponed, with ambition hampered by a lack of resources. The Cop15 summit was relocated from Kunming to Montreal, Canada, where a deal is due to be finalised in December.

The herd caused damage worth $1 million on its journey. More than 25,000 people got involved in tackling the chaos.

To prevent a repeat, the UN report recommends expanding the habitat, connecting protected areas and building a natural barrier to prevent elephants from venturing out of the reserve.

“As a local wildlife organization, we have also made a similar recommendation to connect the fragmented elephant range to ease human-elephant conflict,” says Jinfeng Zhou, secretary-general of Beijing-based China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation.

The post Mystery solved: Chinese elephant trek exposes conservation failures appeared first on Climate Home News.

The heatwave across much of northwest, central and southeast China has lasted 72 days and counting. The previous record set in 2013 was 62 days.

The Chinese Meteorological Administration said the heatwave up to 15 August had been the “strongest” since records began in 1961 and the “coverage of the temperature of above 40C has been the largest in history”. High temperatures persist in many provinces.

Chinese and international experts blame climate change caused by burning fossil fuels.

Chen Lijuan from the National Climate Center told state media on Saturday: “Against the backdrop of global warming, heatwave will be a ‘new normal.’ The high temperature starts early, leaves late and lasts long, this will become more and more obvious in the future.”

A map of the number of high temperature days 1 June to 15 August 2022. Darker red means more high temperature days. (Photo: CMA)

Climate attribution expert Friederike Otto told Climate Home: “Heatwaves in China have definitely become more common and more intense as well as longer in duration because of human-induced climate change.”

While the heatwave has hit large areas of China, the central province of Sichuan has been worst affected. Danson Cheong, a reporter from The Straits Times, said that the soles of his shoes had melted in the heat in Sichuan’s main city Chongqing while Sohu reported that a field of grapes in the province had dried to raisins in the heat.

Chongqing is forecast to stay hot for the rest of the week before cooler, wetter weather arrives.

Hello from Chongqing, where it is 43 degrees Celsius and the heat has literally melted the soles off my feet pic.twitter.com/dNDfeOLpZa

— Danson Cheong (@dansoncj) August 22, 2022

Rainfall has been low. The hot and dry conditions have helped wildfires to spread. One Chongqing resident posted on Weibo yesterday: “The air smelled of smoke all night… when I woke up in the morning, the balcony was full of soot and large piece of things that blown over and scorched by the wind.”

The drought and heat have damaged crops too. According to data released by China’s Ministry of Emergency Management on Thursday, the drought caused a direct economic loss of 2.73 billion Chinese yuan ($400m).

The weather has caused power shortages. Sichuan relies heavily on hydropower. Dry conditions have reduced the water level of reservoirs and therefore the power generated by hydropower turbines. At the same time, hot weather has increased demand for electricity for air conditioning.

The Chongqing mountain fires are trending on Weibo, People’s Daily sent out this video two hours ago, a lot of people in comments repeating the same sentiment: please let it rain, please let it rain pic.twitter.com/7yQgg2jyd5

— Manya Koetse (@manyapan) August 21, 2022

Without electricity, factories have had to shut down, disrupting international supply chains. Suppliers to Tesla, Toyota and FoxConn closed for six days last week.

Energy analyst David Fishman said Shanghai, where he lives, has been sweating under temperatures of 38-40C every day. “I stay inside during the day”, he said. While Fishman and most people in Shanghai now have air conditioning, the technology is less common in rural areas.

The crisis has led to increasing climate awareness, campaigners said. Greenpeace East Asia’s Li Shuo told Climate Home: “Many in China are starting to call 2022 as the first year of the new climate era. The only norm might be abnormality from now on.”

Shocking pictures from China: World’s third-largest river dries up in drought pic.twitter.com/1rXKa01quq

— Daniel Moser (@_dmoser) August 23, 2022

Dmitri De Boer of ClientEarth China told Climate Home there was a lot of coverage in the Chinese media of the heatwave. “I’ve seen more and more coverage where they’re making the link with climate change and the need to accelerate the climate transition,” he said.

In the short term, the government has increased support for coal to make up for the hydropower shortage. Vice-premier Han Zheng said last week that coal use was up 15% year on year in the first two weeks of August and that he would “enhance policy support [and] take multiple measures to help coal plants ease actual difficulties”.

The post China hit by longest and strongest heatwave on record appeared first on Climate Home News.

Hundreds of industries including component suppliers for Toyota, Foxconn and Tesla closed for six days last week. Next, provincial authorities restricted household electricity use.

Drying up the rivers and reservoirs are the heatwaves that began in mid-June and continue to sweep through southern China. Such a prolonged period of heatwave stretching for more than 60 days is happening for the first time since 1961, ramping up household demand for electricity.

“The extreme long lasting heatwaves have driven up cooling demand by 20% combined with low hydropower output due to 50% lower than normal precipitation,” said Yan Qin, an analyst with Refinitiv.

Temperatures have reached 40C in more than 10 provinces, including Sichuan, Henan, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui. In a few places, the mercury touched 45C.

Sichuan, China’s largest and most reliable hydropower producer, with around 90 GW of installed hydropower capacity, fulfills 80% of the province’s power demand. It also supplied uninterrupted power when the country faced a coal shortage last year that caused outages in a few provinces.

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This year’s hydropower shortage might prompt the government to rethink its energy policy. With a 16% share in the country’s energy mix, hydropower is a crucial pillar in China’s efforts to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. In response to the latest crunch, the government is boosting coal generation as an alternative.

The crisis hasn’t come without warning. “We had predicted that climate change, in the current case, causing an extreme weather event, will affect hydropower potential in China,” Qiuhong Tang, a Chinese Academy of Sciences professor, told Climate Home.

Tang and his colleagues, in a study in 2016, estimated that climate change could reduce hydropower potential by 2% in China during 2020-2070. “But in Sichuan, the loss would be up to 10%.”

Rising temperatures are changing rainfall and evaporation patterns in China. As a result, models project a decrease in annual average runoff for most river basins, particularly in the southern areas.

In the recent weeks, “the heatwave also led to fast evaporation of the river and reservoirs,” Qin added, leading to a sharp drop in water levels.

Can China capture excess rainwater during March-June in its dams to generate hydropower in the lean season? Even if the country stores the excess water during the wet season and transfers it for the dry season, said another study, hydropower generation in the Yalong basin “would be reduced by 4 to 6% compared to the baseline period”.

“This change will largely affect the energy generation in Chongqing and Sichuan, which rely heavily on the Yalong River for hydropower generation,” said the authors.

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Urgent adaptation measures are required to deal with the loss of hydropower potential, Tang added. “Government needs to engage more climate scientists and policymakers to deal with the situation, else a source of clean energy that could help the country meet its climate goals will face serious loss.”

“For hydropower, storage management is crucial. Store water when demand is low and generate power from it when demand is high. Climate change affects both electricity demand and inflow into the reservoirs, potentially creating a demand and supply gap,” said Nathalie Voisin, Chief Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, US.

“In some regions, inflows are happening earlier than before, which might be difficult to store until the peak summer months, cascading a water crisis into a power crisis,” she said.

Weather data shows the flood season in southern China began two weeks earlier than usual, and average rainfall hit levels that have not been seen since 1961. And when the heatwave began in mid-June, the water level in Sichuan’s reservoirs started declining, unable to meet the peak summer demand.

“Climate change is challenging hydropower reservoir management worldwide,” added Voisin.

Meanwhile, companies facing significant production losses due to frequent lockdowns imposed as a part of China’s zero-covid-19 policy are getting desperate. Shanghai officials sought priority power access for Tesla suppliers in Sichuan province, sparking a backlash on social media from residents suffering from the power outages.

The post Factories shut down as heatwave hits hydropower in China’s Sichuan province appeared first on Climate Home News.

Earlier this month, China cancelled a climate working group with the US after congressional leader Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. Beijing regards the island state as part of China, despite its independent democracy, and enforces its diplomatic isolation from the rest of the world.

As the US passed $370bn of climate measures in its Inflation Reduction Act, the US’s ambassador to China Nicholas Burns tweeted “the US is acting on climate change… [China] should follow and reconsider its suspension of climate cooperation with the US”.

The U.S. is acting on Climate Change. The recent bill passed by Congress is the largest climate investment in our history and could lead to a roughly 40% reduction in U.S. emissions by 2030. The PRC should follow+reconsider its suspension of climate cooperation with the U.S. https://t.co/BmvnaIkiib

— Ambassador Nicholas Burns (@USAmbChina) August 14, 2022

China’s foreign ministry account responded coolly. It quote-tweeted Burns saying: “Good to hear. But what matters is, can the US deliver?”

The anonymous official added: “Our suggestion: Start by lifting sanctions on Xinjiang’s photovoltaic [solar power] industry +fulfilling its pledge under the Green Climate Fund+ contributing the US’s fair share of an annual $100 billion​​ climate​ finance committed​ by developed countries to [developing] countries.”

Our suggestion: Start by lifting sanctions on Xinjiang’s photovoltaic industry +fulfilling its pledge under the Green Climate Fund+ contributing the US’s fair share of an annual $100 billion​​ climate​ finance committed​ by developed countries to deleveping countries.

— Spokesperson发言人办公室 (@MFA_China) August 16, 2022

The public sparring continued, with Burns replying: “Combatting climate change is a shared responsibility. [China] accounts for 27% of global emissions, the US 11% so why doesn’t [China] resume our climate dialogue? We’re ready.”

The Inflation Reduction Act is now law, you can bet will meet our commitments. But combatting climate change is a shared responsibility: PRC accounts for 27% of global emissions, the U.S. 11%, so why doesn’t the PRC resume our climate dialogue? We’re ready. https://t.co/Z3XOaYIUWb

— Ambassador Nicholas Burns (@USAmbChina) August 17, 2022

The cancelled working group would have brought together experts and politicians from both countries to collaborate on issues like methane emission reductions, clean electricity, the circular economy and climate action from cities.

US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns called on Beijing to “follow” Washington (Pic: Flickr/Brookings Institution)

The Inflation Reduction Act is the US’ largest ever climate spending package. Princeton University’s Repeat project estimates the bill will cut US emissions by 42% between 2005 and 2030. Previously, it was on course for a 27% reduction and it’s target is 50-52%.

The Biden Administration has seized the moment to call on other big emitters to raise their game. But negotiators from emerging economies told Climate Home that while US action could help bring down clean technology costs for everyone, they needed direct support to increase their ambition.

The US lags other developed countries in providing climate finance, including through the UN’s flagship Green Climate Fund. President Joe Biden promised more, but has yet to deliver, and his chances of getting funds through Congress are expected to shrink after November’s midterm elections.

Grenada’s Simon Stiell appointed to lead UN Climate Change

China’s call to end sanctions on the solar industry of the Chinese region of Xinjiang is unlikely to be heeded. The US and independent experts say that quartz, a key ingredient in  polysilicon and therefore solar panels, is mined in Xinjiang by forced labourers from the Uyghur ethnic minority.

The US has banned imports of all goods made in Xinjiang and customs official have seized shipments of solar panels suspected to contain quartz and polysilicon from Xinjiang at the US border.

A 2021 report by Sheffield Hallam University researchers found that Uyghur people were forced to produce quartz and polysilicon under China’s “labour transfer” and “surplus labour” programmes. The Chinese government claims these work programmes are voluntary.

Around 95% of the world’s solar modules rely on solar-grade polysilicon, the report says, and 45% of this is produced in Xinjiang. This polysilicon can be found in solar panels produced and used anywhere in the world.

Burns’s claim that China’s emissions are far higher than the US’s is true but only part of the story. China has over four times as many people, so the average Chinese resident is responsible for half the emissions of an American.

According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, China spent around $300bn a year on the energy transition last year while the US spent $120bn, counting public and private investments.

The post China responds coolly to US climate bill, rejecting a call to resume cooperation appeared first on Climate Home News.

The judgment last week shows judges in China are starting to make a link between national carbon targets and energy-intensive activities. 

The case relates to a dispute between one company that contracted another to buy and operate cryptocurrency mining machines but did not get all the bitcoin it believed it had paid for. The first company sued. Its claim was rejected by a court which judged the mining agreement itself invalid because it harmed the public interest.

On 11 July, the Beijing Third Intermediate People’s Court upheld the verdict, ruling that mining cryptocurrency threatens national economic security and social order. This is consistent with a decision by the People’s Bank of China last September to ban all cryptocurrency transactions, citing their role in facilitating financial crime and growing risks to the country’s economy.  

The court added that mining cryptocurrency wastes energy resources in a way that is incompatible with China’s path to carbon neutrality. “Judging from the high energy consumption of ‘mining’ and the impact of bitcoin trading activities on the country’s financial and social order, the contract involved should be invalid,” it ruled.

Mining cryptocurrency like bitcoin is hugely energy-intensive. A study published in Nature Communications last year found that about 40% of China’s bitcoin mines are powered with coal, while the rest use renewables. Given that Chinese mines power nearly four fifths of the global trade in cryptocurrencies, the study concluded that the industry risks undermining Chinese climate goals and wider global action.

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Experts said the latest court ruling is primarily about enforcing the ban on cryptocurrency activities, since covert mining is on the rise again. But growing environmental and energy security concerns among the public do have a role to play.

With restrictions on activism and wider public debate, litigation has proved a powerful route for public prosecutors and NGOs to enforce environmental measures.  

Lawsuits about climate change are only just starting to emerge, in part because China lacks any national climate legislation. But following president Xi Jinping’s commitment to peak national emissions by 2030 and reach climate neutrality by 2060, courts are starting to consider non-legal policy documents or statements by leaders in cases before them.

Danting Fan, climate and finance lawyer at ClientEarth China, said that, in the absence of a national climate law, the latest judgment was the first time a ruling of final effect explicitly mentioned China’s carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals and “determined a commercial contract to be null and void because of the high energy consumption of the bitcoin mining process, among other reasons, and required parties to promote sustainable development”.

She noted that Zhou Qiang, chief justice of the Supreme People’s Court, has encouraged judges to understand the climate implications of the cases before them. “This is the first example we know of where the judge picked up on this.” 

How the decision will affect China’s cryptocurrency market is unclear. Alex de Vries, data scientist at De Nederlandsche Bank, researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the man behind Digiconomist, said that because miners have scaled down their operations to stay under the radar it is hard for the authorities to weed them all out.

The price of bitcoin dropped from an all-time high of over $65,000 in November 2021 to $18,000 in June, slashing the margins for miners. But de Vries said that, under the right conditions, mining can still be very profitable.

“The price crash hit older and less efficient mining operations hard, but those operating with very cheap electricity and the latest mining devices can still make good money,” he said. “It really depends on what machines you have, how efficiently you can cool them and how much you pay for electricity.”

The post Chinese court rules bitcoin mining harms the climate appeared first on Climate Home News.

At the same time, his government has clamped down on public debate and independent journalism.

A draconian “zero-Covid” policy has served to tighten government control over information. Xi closed the door to outsiders, severely limited people’s movements and restricted Chinese diplomats’ presence at international climate meetings.

As President Xi seeks a third term at this autumn’s Communist Party Congress, the space for dialogue on climate action is narrower than ever.

Climate Home News spoke with 11 journalists and experts on China’s climate and energy policies, both inside and outside the country, about the implications for the media and civil society. All agreed to talk on condition of anonymity – a symptom of how sensitive the issue has become.

They explained that tighter restrictions are leaving them dependent on the government’s narrative – making it harder than ever for the outside world to understand what is really going on in China.

“China has become incapable of projecting its voice overseas,” one Beijing-based researcher told Climate Home.

China watchers told Climate Home of a relative “golden age” for reporting in the country over the period 2008-2012.

“Climate and environment was a permitted space for discussion in China, much more than other issues,” one China expert told Climate Home.

That space “started to shrink about 10 years ago” when President Xi came to power. Since then, the trend has been accelerating. And Covid-19 has made it worse.

In Chinese news outlets, reporter Hongqiao Liu recently described to the China Media Project, environmental coverage went from a burgeoning beat to an underfunded afterthought.

Liu started on the environment beat in 2010 thinking it a “safe choice” compared to other topics. She left in 2014, citing dwindling environment coverage and an inhospitable environment.

That same year, China signed a deal with the US which paved the way for the Paris Agreement – the first global climate treaty – to be adopted a year later. During Barack Obama’s presidency, climate action was seen as a bright spot in otherwise tense Sino-American relations.

In 2016, Chinese officials took part in a G20 peer review of fossil fuel subsidies, opening up their policy calculations to international scrutiny.

In 2020, Xi told the UN general assembly in New York that China would peak its emissions this decade and achieve net zero emissions by 2060. If achieved, this could prevent 0.2-0.3C of global heating.

But as China’s importance for international climate efforts grew, Beijing’s thinking on the issue became increasingly opaque.

The introduction of legislation regulating international NGOs in 2016 was a turning point. Under the law, all international groups have to register with and be supervised by a government ministry.

Obtaining visas became increasingly difficult for foreign journalists and Chinese citizens were restricted from working as reporters for foreign media outlets. Those who do remain largely uncredited and take considerable risks.

At the end of 2020, Haze Fan, who worked for Bloomberg News’ bureau in Beijing, was detained on suspicion of endangering national security. She was reportedly released on bail last month.

Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House further soured US-China relations and journalists got caught in the crossfire. Trump limited the number of Chinese citizens who could work in the US for state-run Chinese news organisations and China expelled journalists working for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Australian journalists joined the exodus after becoming embroiled in a national security case. And last year British journalist John Sudworth, of the BBC, left China after “an intensifying propaganda campaign targeting not just the BBC but me personally”.

Hong Kong, which had been a relatively safe place from which to report on mainland China, became less so with the introduction of a sweeping national security law in 2020. Sudworth moved to Taiwan.

China is expelling all American journalists w/the NYT, WSJ & WaPo — myself included. So many feelings, but I keep coming back to my last trip, to Wuhan, where ppl were so willing to talk - they wanted the world to know what was happening to them and to hold their govt accountable https://t.co/VQnKk6NITs

— Amy Qin (@amyyqin) March 17, 2020

Covid restrictions have made things worse.

Accessing sources and verifying information has become increasingly difficult. Public conferences, which had been a vital source of information on the government’s climate policies and a meeting place for sources, are not happening.

Officials and policymakers are increasingly reluctant to talk to researchers and the media, even “off the record” or through informal channels. “We are left guessing and reading between the lines of policy documents,” one researcher told Climate Home.

Despite relatively low levels of infections in most places, Chinese residents are required to test every three days in a designated testing facility to enter any public space. A single person being in contact with someone with the virus is enough to cordon off an entire apartment block.

Freedom of movement is dictated by a colour system, or “health code”, on your phone. Green is a freedom pass. Red immediately bans you from all public venues and transport and may require spending weeks in a quarantine hotel.

The policy has armed local authorities with renewed arguments to restrict on-the-ground reporting, making visits to coal power plants or solar farms nearly impossible.

Most sources say the restrictions are no longer just about public health, but about control.

In late May, hundreds of people travelled to banks in the city of Zhengzhou to protest being denied access to billions of yuan from their savings in a case of suspected financial fraud.

As protesters arrived in the city, those who had green health codes on departure found they had turned red and they were quarantined. The case received huge backlash online, leading to concerns it would undermine the credibility of the regime’s Covid policies.

A woman being tested for Covid-19 in a city in China (Photo: QuantFoto/Flickr)

Among six China-based climate reporters Climate Home spoke to, four have left or are planning to leave the country – explaining that their work might as well be done from outside China.

One reporter described being “nervous” about staying in the country. “It’s a lot of stress financially and emotionally.”

A 2021 report by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China found that “the number of journalists forced out by the Chinese state [is] grow[ing] due to excessive intimidation or outright expulsions”.

“People like me have basically been forced to live in exile if we want to pursue our career of reporting on China as a journalist independently,” Jing Yang, who was born and raised in China and covers financial and business news for the Wall Street Journal from Hong Kong, recently told the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

But exile is no easy route. Sources told Climate Home that their contacts had started to go dry on them when they realised they were working for foreign outlets outside China.

Environment reporter Liu eventually left China to pursue other opportunities and returned to climate journalism in Europe for a year in 2021.

Despite identifying “a real appetite for credible, independent and fast-responding reporting on China's rapidly evolving energy and climate policy,” she described facing “structural discrimination” in newsrooms and complained that Chinese reporters were being “instrumentalised” – which did little to close the knowledge gap.

Pudong, Shanghai is on highest alert since lockdown eased on June 1. We have had 5 mandatory PCR tests in 6 days. After finish today’s test I was out to have a walk and passed a test station at a mall. This is the queuing line. pic.twitter.com/D9ZJED7jki

— 徐春 Chun Xu, CFA (@ChunXuCFA) July 12, 2022

The Covid restrictions further mean few climate officials have been able to leave China over the past two and half years.

Scaled down delegations of climate and biodiversity negotiators have attended UN negotiations, at the cost of spending weeks in quarantine on their return.

Climate envoy Xie Zhenhua has taken just one trip out of China so far this year to attend meetings on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the G7 climate ministerial meeting in Berlin and the Ministerial on Climate Action in Stockholm.

“Only by cooperation can we find the solution,” Xie told political and business leaders in the Swiss resort.

But, according to one source, there are “fewer and fewer windows for China and the West to have a dialogue on climate change” and there is a risk of Beijing slipping “out of sight and out of mind”. “If you’re not there at the table, people tend to forget about you.”

In this vacuum, mistrust of China grows.

“We have seen a surge in misunderstanding and misinformation about China looking into the world and the world looking into China,” said Yang, of the Wall Street Journal.

Nuance is lost, the bureau chief of a major US outlet told the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China. "Everything gets more black and white."

That’s “deeply unsatisfactory,” one non-Chinese source told Climate Home, because “China is the number one story when it comes to climate change”.

The coastal resort of Beidhaihe in China's Hebei province is due to host a summer retreat of top Chinese officials ahead of the 20th Communist Party Congress in the autumn (Photo: Autumn Park CNFlickr)

The coming months are critical for China's leadership.

The coastal town of Beidaihe, in China’s north-eastern Hebei province, is preparing to host a summer retreat of top Chinese officials to discuss the next political appointments.

Like much of China’s decision-making, the annual seaside gathering is veiled in secrecy and even the precise meeting dates are kept under wraps.

Tesla cars have been banned from the roads for the next two months as officials are leery their onboard cameras could be used by the US to spy on the event.

Then in autumn comes the Congress meeting at which Xi is widely expected to secure a third term. A two-term limit was scrapped in 2018, opening the door for Xi to keep power for life.

Other senior officials are vying for top positions in the Politburo – the Communist Party’s decision-making body.

Until they know where they stand, nobody wants to rock the boat. “It creates a huge amount of pressure on officials across the system, including down to local environmental bureaus: no-one wants to be seen to mess up,” one senior China watcher said.

China’s ambitious rooftop solar pilot helps drive ‘blistering’ capacity growth

Chinese officials continue to argue that Covid vaccine levels remain too low for the country to safely reopen and a major outbreak could overwhelm hospitals.

In the wake of a severe power crunch that gripped the country in 2021, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and declining economic growth, security and stability have become the watchwords.

On climate and energy, that means shoring up power supplies. Despite a pledge to strictly control coal consumption until 2025, when it will be gradually phased down, China is increasing coal production to meet soaring electricity demand.

Meanwhile, Beijing is trying to incorporate climate action in its economic planning. Climate Home understands that the influential National Development and Reform Commission, which oversees strategic economic planning, is wrangling to take over the climate portfolio from the less powerful environment department.

Most of Chinese society can only watch and wait to see which way the political wind will blow. There is little hope for a return to openness any time soon.

“We are reversing back into a dark period of our politics,” said one Chinese source.

This article was updated after publication to clarify Hongqiao Liu's career path and the interpretation of her interview with the China Media Project.

The post As Xi Jinping seeks more power, the world’s window into China’s climate action narrows appeared first on Climate Home News.

On Wednesday, the housing department and the National Development and Reform Commission, which oversees strategic planning, announced a plan for new-build public buildings and factories in town and cities to be covered at 50% by solar panels by 2025.

It complements a policy to install solar PV on existing buildings. In September 2021, the National Energy Bureau promoted a pilot scheme that allows local authorities to partner with solar developers, often state-owned companies, to meet rooftop solar targets for different sectors.

By the end of 2023, the bureau proposed to cover with solar panels 50% of rooftop space on party and government buildings, 40% of schools, hospitals and other public buildings, 30% of industrial and commercial spaces and 20% of rural households. A total of 676 counties from 31 provinces have registered for the scheme.

According to local reports, nearly all projects have started and there are early signs of success.  In the first quarter of the year, distributed solar installation tripled to 9GW, up from 3GW the same time last year.

“The blistering growth in China’s solar power installations this year is largely driven by distributed/rooftop projects,” tweeted Lauri Myllyvirta, of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, who described the policy as “ambitious and smart”.

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In the first five months of the year, China’s overall installed solar capacity was 24GW – a year-on-year increase of close to 140%.

This is largely driven by “clean energy bases” – unprecedented concentrations of large-scale solar projects in China’s deserts and on barren land.

But analysts told Climate Home News the rooftop solar policy was making a strong contribution.

The pilot alone could deliver installed capacity around 100GW, analysts estimate. If the policy is rolled out across the country, it could eventually reach 600GW. 

“China is making very impressive efforts to install solar energy,” Xing Zhang, senior analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. “It has gigantic projects and smaller projects like rooftop PVs. Almost all the available surfaces in China are going to be covered by solar panels, with big projects covering the deserts and small projects covering the rooftops.”

The rooftop solar programme, she added, will “no doubt help to decarbonise China’s power sector and help with the energy system transition”.

The programme has been hailed for the way it delivers a top-down policy in a decentralised manner.

David Fishman, an energy sector consultant for the China-based Lantau group, told Climate Home that local authorities and companies play a critical role in identifying building owners to host the panels and organise contracts. Once the permits are secured, local actors can sell the project to larger developers that carry out the installations.

“It’s like paying someone to mix the ingredients for a cake for you and put it in a pan, and then you buy the unbaked cake from them and bake it yourself,” Fishman said.

When the developers get involved, they have a choice of two models: residents buy the panels and sell the power to the developer. Or the developer leases the rooftop space from the owners and owns the panels.

The first option is preferred, Fishman explained. “The rural residents tend to take better care of the solar panels when they own them,” he said, citing problems with rural residents using panels to hang clothes or dry grain.

The outcome is that each actor along the value chain is incentivised to massively boost solar installations, he added. The bulk of the cost is shouldered by state-owned companies and building owners are guaranteed an income from selling the power.

Comment: Heat and humidity gets dangerous to health sooner than most people realise

Some electricity distribution companies have called for a slowdown of installations where the grid wasn't ready for such a high volume of extra power, Fishman said. "But at the end of the day, that's more of a good problem to have."

“The programme will definitely drive China’s installed solar capacity in the coming years,” said Jin Boyang, a senior analyst for Refinitiv based in Beijing, describing a “promising” tool to help China meet its goal of 1,200GW of renewable capacity by 2025.

If proved successful, it could become a model for other developing countries "as it could dramatically increase the electrification rate of rural areas," he said.

The post China’s ambitious rooftop solar pilot helps drive ‘blistering’ capacity growth appeared first on Climate Home News.

The US proposed that a “work programme” to accelerate emission cuts and close the gap to global climate goals lead to “concrete actions by major emitters with capabilities”.

A group of “like-minded” countries, including China and India, and the Arab group objected to the language. It was deleted from the latest version of the informal notes encapsulating the discussions.

“There is a ping pong fight between the US and China,” Eddy Perez, international climate diplomacy manager of Climate Action Network Canada, told Climate Home, describing the spat as deeply political.

Saudi Arabia’s senior negotiator Ayman Shasly steps back from climate talks

The US has repeatedly sought to make China own up to being the world’s largest emitter. In 2019, it contributed more than 27% of global emissions.

Washington argues that the less greenhouse gas China emits, the lower the losses and damages experienced by vulnerable communities on the climate frontlines.

On a historical emissions basis, China comes a distant second to the US.

While the language of “major emitter” is used in forums such as the G20, to which China is a member, Beijing argues it has no meaning in the formal UN climate process. Using the term would create a new categorisation of  countries, which isn’t part of the Paris Agreement, it says.

The backdrop for the discussions is a grim picture of continued rising emissions. Temperature projections based on countries’ latest 2030 emissions targets point to 2.4C of warming.

Countries agreed at the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow, UK, “to revisit and strengthen the 2030 targets” this year.

So far, only Australia has promised deeper emissions cuts. Brazil updated its climate plan but an accounting change means it is heading for higher emissions than it projected in 2015.

India has yet to commit Narendra Modi’s verbal promise of increased ambition to paper and the timing of Cop27 host Egypt’s stepped up objective remains vague.

Both the US and China’s carbon-cutting efforts are insufficient to put the world on track to 1.5C, according to Climate Action Tracker. But neither have indicated they are likely to improve their headline targets.

“Governments appear to think taking more action is too hard,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics. “The world appears to be sleepwalking to disaster.”

Saudi Arabia’s senior negotiator Ayman Shasly steps back from climate talks

To help bridge the gap to 1.5C, countries agreed at the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow, UK, to establish “a work programme” to “urgently” accelerate emission cuts this decade.

In Bonn, country delegates thrashed out ideas for what the work should look like, its scope and how long it should last in view of making a decision at Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

But they disagreed on everything, including how to carry the process forward.

Some of the proposals made by countries include helping nations to strengthen and implement their climate plans, closing the ambition gap, enhancing sectoral action, sharing best practice and lessons learnt and increasing finance.

Even the timeline is contentious. China, India and the Arab group say the discussions should last a year and end in 2023. Vulnerable nations, the EU and US say that to be meaningful, the discussions should last until 2030.

A compromise will require political intervention and a decision by ministers at the next climate talks in November.

“Either they choose to find collaborative solutions to help each other cut emissions, or they play the blame game and throw the most vulnerable countries on the frontlines of climate change under the bus,” Tom Evans, of think tank E3G, told Climate Home.

“Some negotiators are fiddling while the world burns,” added his colleague and veteran climate observer Alden Meyer.

The post China rejects ‘major emitter’ label in talks to step up climate action appeared first on Climate Home News.

In its energy plan for 2021-2025, China aims to increase production of oil, gas, coal, nuclear, wind and solar energy to prevent electricity blackouts and cut dependence on foreign energy suppliers.

While tackling climate change remains a goal of the Chinese government, the volatility in energy prices triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed self-reliance up the agenda.

Greenpeace East Asia campaigner Li Shuo called China’s strategy an “all of the above” approach. “The short term priority is to ensure energy supply and boost growth,” he said.

“In the West, coal and renewable energy have an offsetting relationship. In China, they go hand in hand. And that’s of course not good from a climate point of view.”

Last September, the price of coal rose and Chinese power plants stopped buying as much as they needed. This led to electricity shortages. Some factories had to go without power and some cities lost their heating, lifts and traffic lights.

China’s economic boom has been fuelled by cheap coal (Photo: IEA/Screenshot)

Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air analyst Lauri Myllyvirta said that, since then, “ramping up coal output has been a high priority”.

In January, president Xi Jinping poured cold water on climate hopes by saying that China needed to “overcome the notion of rapid success” and that “reducing emissions is not about reducing productivity and it is not about not emitting at all either”.

The soaring price of fossil fuels in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has increased China’s desire to produce its own energy, Myllyvirta said.

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The latest five-year plan does not include a specific target for coal production, but new small coal plants and upgrades to existing coal plants are expected to play a role in adding a massive 800GW of power generation capacity.

E3G analyst Byford Tsang said the plan “does not give us any new clues as to how China intends to ‘strictly control’ (a pledge given in the earlier national policy ‘1+N’) the most emission-intensive power source – coal”.

China plans to “recover and stabilise” oil output to 200 million tons a year by 2025, a 5% increase on 2018. It is targetting production of 230 billion cubic meters of gas by 2025, a 19% increase on 2020.

At the same time, China wants to boost its renewables and nuclear power. By 2025, it aims to increase the proportion of non-fossil energy consumption to 20% and non-fossil power generation to 39%.

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Refinitiv analyst Yan Qin said that this target was “not ambitious” and in line with existing 2030 renewable energy goals.

But Tsang said: “The plan shows that China remains committed to growing its clean energy systems. It lays out the steps required to facilitate China’s energy transition.”

It will do this largely through building “clean energy centres”, mainly in the poorer and sparsely-populated west of China.

For example, it plans to install 450 GW of renewable energy capacity in the Gobi desert. That’s more than the US’ entire wind and solar generating fleet.

The plan outlines investments in transmission lines to help carry this electricity to where it is needed and pumped storage to balance the grid.

The post After blackouts, China’s green goals take back seat to energy security appeared first on Climate Home News.

That’s more than twice the total amount of solar and wind power installed in the USA.

Client Earth’s China representative Dimtri De Boer said: “450GW is really huge. That would be the lion’s share of new solar and wind capacity installation until 2030.”

The scaling up of renewable deployment should be “a major economic boost for China’s underdeveloped western regions,” he said.

Greenpeace East Asia’s Li Shuo said: “This is the positive side of the China climate story. People should get used to big numbers… China’s challenge is how to stop the coal side of the story, which is growing in equally big numbers.”

Swap Russian gas for renewables, EU tells member states

The Gobi desert straddles China’s northern border with Mongolia. The land is cheap and there is lots of wind and sunshine.

A map of China with the windiest areas in red. (Photo: Global Wind Atlas/Screenshot))

The province of Inner Mongolia, which includes most of China’s Gobi desert, is the biggest producer of coal in China and has pursued a coal-led recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.

China has brought the costs of manufacturing solar panels down and is able to use these cheap domestic panels in projects like this.

“It only makes sense to deploy domestically made renewable energy equipments in big scale as a way to contribute to climate action as well as economic growth,” Li said.

Vanessa Nakate confronts rich world’s ministers over loss and damage

Similar programmes in the early 2010s were hampered by bottlenecks in the grid infrastructure to deliver the electricity to major cities. This meant renewable producers had to make less electricity than they could have done.

“That problem has largely been solved,” Li said. “Building stuff in China is never a problem.”

Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis analyst Simon Nicholas agreed. He told Climate Home: “China is a world leader in long distance transmission and has been building ultra high voltage direct current transmission lines for years now so if anyone can do it, China can.”

But De Boer warned that transmission would still be costly. Electricity will be lost while being transmitted long distances from the desert to China’s more populated areas.

Around the world, women are putting their lives on the line to defend the climate

New York University Shanghai professor Yifei Li said that maintaining a large solar farm in the desert would be relatively expensive because of the region’s remoteness, the steep difference between day and nighttime temperatures and the high level of dust which reduces panels’ effectiveness.

What to do with the old solar panels when they stop working will become an issue in the future, Yifei Li added.

Li Shuo agreed this would become a “hot topic” in the near future but said “by then, low labor cost, economies of scale, and some of the other factors that enabled the rapid development of the renewable energy industry in the first place will make China a leading performer”.

The post China plans huge wind and solar power rollout in Gobi desert appeared first on Climate Home News.

But, as gold-medal winning Chinese-American teenager Eileen Gu spun four and a half times in the air, the backdrop was three Olympic-ring branded cooling towers.

On social media, it was mocked as “dystopian”, a “hellscape” and a symbol of climate change. Users speculated that it was a nuclear power or coal plant.

It’s actually the disused Shougang steel mill. Previously the city’s biggest polluter and one of its biggest employers, it shut down before the 2008 Olympics due to concerns over air pollution.

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Asked about the mockery, Beijing-based Greenpeace activist Li Shuo told Climate Home News: “I can’t comment on other people’s taste… For me, it is breathtaking. Just stunning,” he said.

The cooling towers were compared to The Simpson’s fictional Springfield nuclear power plant but Li said: “There are at least two themes that are meaningful if one bothers to dig a little deeper than Homer Simpson”.

First, he said, “it tells people that sports could be close to you, not necessarily in the Alps thousands of miles away”.

Second, he said, “it highlights a city’s transition towards a low-carbon economy and the tangible progress that can be achieved”.

Referring to London’s disused coal plant turned art gallery, he asked: “How come Tate Modern is cool and Big Air Shougang is not?”

London’s Tate Modern used to be a coal power plant but is now a modern art gallery (Photo: ReservasdeCoches.com/Flickr)

Over the last two decades, China’s capital has reduced its air pollution significantly by curbing coal smoke from heavy industry and home heating.

The area around the steel mill, which was built in 1919, was tranformed into a destination for tourism and cultural events, hosting weddings, electronic music festivals and breweries.

Engineering firm Arup, who redeveloped the site, claims it did so in a low-carbon way with green buildings, transport and energy. The company also claims the area’s design helps absorb rainwater, reducing the risk of flooding.

While Beijing’s air quality has benefitted from the mill’s closure though, the atmosphere hasn’t. The Shougang company opened a new mill a few hours’ drive out of town in Hebei province. So coal is still being burned to make steel, just not in Beijing.

Steel plants (red and orange) have moved from Beijing to neighbouring Hebei province (Photo: Global Energy Monitor/Global steel plant tracker)

On top of this, according to Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air analyst Lauri Myllyvirta, some of the pollution wasn’t banished far enough away for Beijingers.

“All the heavy industry from Beijing was moved to different parts of Hebei [before the 2008 olympics], assuming that’s so far away – 300/400 km – that it is not going to affect Beijing any more,” he said .

“But in the following half a decade the industry mushroomed to such a size in Hebei that that became a much bigger problem for Beijing’s air quality,” he added.

The games’ environmental critics have pointed to the use of energy and water intensive fake snow, both at the venues in Beijing and at the Zhangjiakou ski slopes, a three hour drive north of Beijing.

This is the Winter Olympics in the era of climate breakdown. The first winter games to rely almost entirely on fake snow. The hills outside Beijing are snow-free, so 49 million gallons of water and 300 snow guns have been used to create this. pic.twitter.com/wYtB6qMGII

— XR Cambridge (@xr_cambridge) February 6, 2022

Fake snow is needed because, although it is cold, the area is dry. Evaluting Beijing’s bid, the International Olympic Committee said: “Northern China suffers from severe water stress and the Beijing-Zhangjiakou area is becoming increasingly arid.” It blamed this stress on climate change, intensive industrial and agricultural use and high domestic demand.

Beijing is not the first host city to struggle for snow. As early as 1964, Austrian volunteers had to carry and hand-pack ice into snow for the Innsbruck games. New York’s Lake Placid was the first games to use snow machines in 1980. In recent years, their use has become routine. They were used in Vancouver in 2010, Sochi in 2014 and PyeongChang in 2018.

But Beijing is the first games to rely completely on fake snow. Strasbourg University geographer Carmen de Jong told the Wall Street Journal that making this snow could use two million cubic metres of water, worsening the region’s water stress.

Turning water to snow is also energy-intensive although the venues’ developer claims the snow canons are powered by nearby wind farms.

The trend towards fake snow is likely to intensify at future Winter Olympics as the climate heats up. Of the 21 past venues, a study by the University of Waterloo found that only 12 will be cold enough to host it with real snow again in the 2050s, even if the world meets its Paris climate targets.

Places like Russia’s black sea resort of Sochi and the Alpine towns of Grenoble, Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Chamonix will be too warm, they found.

This study only took into account temperature, not rainfall levels. So it included Beijing in its list of  eight hosts which will stay “climate reliable” even in a high-emissions scenario in the 2080s.

The next games will be hosted by the Italian city of Milan and the nearby ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo. According to Waterloo University, this will be reliably cold enough for snow.

The post Cooling towers, fake snow: What the Beijing Winter Olympics says about climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

The city authorities declared on Tuesday they had fully met all their air quality targets for the first time in 2021 – almost a decade earlier than experts expected. This followed measures to curb coal smoke from heavy industry and home heating.

Between 2013 and 2021, they claimed to have reduced the weight of dangerous particles (PM2.5) in the air by 63% to 33 micrograms. The official figures are in line with those recorded from the US embassy in Beijing and progress reported by the UN Environment Programme. While a huge improvement, the average pollution level is still more than double the World Health Organization’s recommended limit of 15 micrograms.

David Vance Wagner was the US climate envoy’s China lead under president Barack Obama. He tweeted: “Incredible… Extraordinary progress that was almost unimaginable 10 years ago.”

Incredible: Beijing gov’t has announced that the city met China’s air quality targets for all 6 key pollutants in 2021. Extraordinary progress that was almost unimaginable 10 years ago. https://t.co/M5XiGoilDA pic.twitter.com/5Tpcf0vNu2

— David Vance Wagner (@vancewagner) January 4, 2022

Greenpeace East Asia’s political adviser Li Shuo told Climate Home News: “Back in 2013 [when particularly severe air pollution sparked protests], the current progress is what we thought could only be possible around 2030.”

While Beijing has been attempting to reduce air pollution since before the 2008 Olympics, the issue shot up the political agenda in the winter of 2012/2013 when the PM2.5 level spiked to 993 micrograms/m3.

At the time there were media reports of children playing sport in domes, international companies handing out masks to foreign employees and elite golfers wearing masks at a televised competition in Beijing.

Lauri Myllyvirta, director of the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air said: “There was an outpouring of public concern and anger. It was the golden period of Chinese social media expression [before censorship intensified] and it was just everywhere. It was really the main topic of conversation.”

He added that the pressure on the government was greater because Beijing’s middle and upper class, including the decision-makers themselves, were affected.

A girl and her mother wear respirator masks and hold a banner reading “No PM2.5”. (Photo: Greenpeace/Wu Di)

US direct diplomacy played a role, with the embassy installing air pollution monitors and regularly tweeting the PM2.5 pollution levels to raise awareness. It used the US Environmental Protection agency label which classified as “hazardous” concentrations the Chinese government labelled as “moderately polluted”, Myllyvirta said.

“That discrepancy, even more than the data and the numbers, showed that the Chinese government [was] playing this down and not taking it seriously,” he added.

In response to the criticism, the Beijing authorities cracked down emissions from coal. They continued their policy of switching from coal power to gas and worked with neighbours to set emissions standards for coal-fired power stations and heavy industries like steel and cement.

Coal-burning industries were financially rewarded for reducing emissions. Many installed machines called scrubbers, which filter out harmful particles before they are released into the atmosphere.

Homeowners got subsidies to switch their coal-fired boilers, used to heat homes in the winter, to cleaner gas-fired ones. “In the winter of 2017/2018, coal-based heating was basically eliminated,” Myllyvirta said.

Stacks of coal for sale in a Hutong (alley) in Beijing in 2006. (Photo: Greenpeace/Natalie Behring)

Myllyvirta said Beijing’s example shows reducing air pollution is “doable” and “makes perfect economic sense”. Every country’s path to reducing air pollution will differ though, he said, as their decision-making systems and pollution sources vary.

Li said that Beijing’s success has been repeated across China. “Most cities have seen improvement over the last decade. Beijing is certainly one of the fastest,” he said. But, he added, “it is still miserable in much of Hebei, Henan, Shanxi, Shandong, and Sichuan”.

Myllyvirta said he expected Beijing’s air pollution levels to continue to fall and the authorities next needed to reduce the absolute amount of coal and oil that is burned.

The post ‘Extraordinary progress’ – Beijing meets air pollution goals after coal crackdown appeared first on Climate Home News.

In his opening speech to the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (Focac) in Senegal, president Xi Jinping pledged to donate 600 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines and redistribute $10 billion worth of rare IMF reserve assets, known as special drawing rights (SDRs), to African countries. China’s allocation of 29bn SDRs is worth about $40bn.

SDRs enable countries to borrow at the cheap rates enjoyed by wealthy nations and have been billed as a powerful tool to finance the clean energy transition.

Together, China and Africa “have written a splendid chapter of mutual assistance amidst complex changes, and set a shining example for building a new type of international relations,” Xi told the meeting.

Analysts agreed that while the details matter, the pledge put pressure on other rich nations to show greater solidarity with the developing world.

“It puts pressure on western donors. It will be difficult for advanced economies to justify that they are not in a position to contribute that share when China is able to do it,” Aldo Caliari, of the Jubilee USA Network, an NGO which advocates for debt relief, told Climate Home News.

Mia Mottley: the ‘fearless’ leader pushing a global settlement for the climate frontlines

The IMF injected $650bn  of SDRs into the global economy in August to help countries recover from Covid-19 by buying vaccines, alleviating debt and investing in sustainable development.

By default, SDRs are allocated to countries proportionally to the size of their economy, which means richer nations receive most of the support.

But a global call by IMF boss Kristalina Georgieva for rich nations to voluntarily redistribute the money to those who need it most has won support from the world’s largest economies.

The G20 agreed on a collective goal to redirect $100bn of the money to poor and vulnerable countries – less than a quarter of what they have received.

Earlier this year, France committed to redirect 20% of its SDRs to African countries. Italy and the UK both pledged to return 20% to their allocation to vulnerable low and middle-income economies.

Meanwhile Joe Biden’s administration has asked the US Congress to approve the donation of $21bn of the $113bn it received – around 18.6% of its share, Caliari said.

As Delhi chokes, India’s supreme court is grappling with the air pollution crisis

Paul Steele, chief economist at the London-based IIED think tank, said China’s commitment was “a big and frankly quite generous offer”.

“It’s impressive that China has trumped OECD countries by coming out with a much larger re-allocation,” he told Climate Home.

He added that the move would put pressure on Japan – China’s close rival – which is yet to announce the share of SDRs it will redistribute, to put a bigger number on the table.

How the money will be distributed and for what purpose is critical.

“To some extent any injection of cash into cash-strapped African economies is going to create some space,” Ronan Palmer, of think tank E3G, told Climate Home.

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President Xi named green development and renewable energy as one of four priorities for China-Africa cooperation and committed Beijing to undertake 10 environmental protection and climate action projects to support low-carbon developments and climate adaptation.

This could help African countries build their manufacturing capacity for the clean energy transition – or it could mean they continue to import solar panels and other technology from China. And some of the SDRs could go straight back to China as repayment for outstanding debts.

“That would be a very self-serving way for China to use its SDRs – the question is what mechanism will there be to ensure that it benefits the populations,” Caliari said. “But if this is used well and with proper safeguards it could an example for countries to build upon.”

‘Breakthrough’: IMF develops fund to help debt-laden nations address climate risks

The IMF is developing a Resilience and Sustainability Trust to redistribute the SDRs from rich to poorer countries along with policy support to manage macro-economic climate risks. But experts were sceptical that China would choose that route.

Caliari said using IMF trusts to channel funds to Africa would be difficult because none of them have a regional component. Instead, eligibility is determined by levels of income.

Other options include using a World Bank fund, the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund  or even to bilaterally transfer the cash directly to African countries’ central banks.

For Hannah Ryder, the Kenyan CEO of Beijing-based consultancy Development Reimagined, the money should ideally be re-distributed through African-owned institutions such as the African Development Bank or a planned African Monetary Fund.

“It would give African nations the independence to manage it on their own,” she said, adding that going through the IMF should be an option of “last resort” because of fund’s record of imposing onerous conditions.

“$10bn is not massively transformative but it sets a precedent for what other international partners can be doing,” Ryder said.

The post China ‘trumps’ the west by pledging larger share of IMF relief to African nations appeared first on Climate Home News.

The world’s two biggest emitters released a surprise joint statement on Wednesday evening setting out their intention to “seize on this critical moment to engage in expanded individual and combined efforts to accelerate the transition to a global net zero economy”.

An unformatted draft was hastily shared through climate communications networks on a Google Doc before the official version was published by the US state department and Chinese environment ministry websites.

Under the deal, both sides promised to act in this “decisive decade” to reduce emissions and keep the goals of the Paris Agreement to limit temperature rise “well below 2C” and pursue efforts for 1.5C “within reach”.

They recognised that “there remains a significant gap” between current national carbon-cutting pledges and policies and what is needed to achieve the Paris goals.

“The two sides stress the vital importance of closing that gap as soon as possible, particularly through stepped-up efforts,” it reads.

I welcome today's agreement between China and the USA to work together to take more ambitious #ClimateAction in this decade.

Tackling the climate crisis requires international collaboration and solidarity, and this is an important step in the right direction. #COP26

— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) November 10, 2021

China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua and the US’ John Kerry announced the deal separately, in consecutive press conferences.

Xie told media: “In the area of climate change there is more agreement between China and the US than divergence, making it an area with huge potential for our cooperation.

“We are two days away from the end of the Glasgow Cop so we hope that this declaration can make a China-US contribution to the success of Cop26.”

Kerry said: “This declaration is a step that we can build on in order to close the [ambition] gap. Every step matters right now. We have a long journey ahead of us. We have to mitigate faster, have to cut methane emissions faster, continue to raise ambition and most of all we have to take action in order to keep 1.5C alive.”

The two sides have been discussing the deal “for months,” said Kerry. They held more than 30 virtual meetings and met in Shanghai, London and Glasgow before the agreement was reached on Wednesday afternoon.

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Analysts welcomed the signs of cooperation amid what has been a strained bilateral relationship in recent years.

The two nations struck a deal in 2014 that was widely seen as critical to the success of the Paris climate summit but have since clashed over issues like trade and human rights.

Thom Woodroofe, a senior advisor at the Asian Society, said that while Wednesday’s deal was not such a “gamechanger”, “in many ways it’s just as much of a step forward given the geopolitical state of the relationship”.

“It means the intense level of US-China dialogue on climate can now begin to translate into cooperation,” he said.

Bernice Lee, a China expert at think tank Chatham House, said the joint statement “could only be good news”. “Details remain patchy but this declaration should dissolve any fears that US-China tensions will stand in the way of success at Cop26,” she said.

But “the real test for Washington and Beijing is how hard they push for a 1.5C-aligned deal here in Glasgow,” she added.

Thunberg v Carney: tensions flare over net zero and carbon offsets at Cop26

Beijing-Washington cooperation will accelerate emission reductions, including by setting specific goals, targets, policies, and measures, the statement said.

The document identifies cutting methane emissions as a critical area of cooperation with both sides agreeing to develop additional measures by Cop27 in 2022.

The US has led efforts with the EU to bring together an alliance of more than 100 countries committed to collective cut emissions 30% by 2030

While China hasn’t signed the pledge, it committed to develop “a comprehensive and ambitious” national action plan on methane to cut the potent greenhouse gas’ emissions in the 2020s.

They agreed to convene a meeting in the first half of 2022 to discuss measures and standards through to reduce methane from coal, oil and gas production, the waste sectors and the agricultural sector. 

Good news that US and China have found common ground on climate. This is a challenge which transcends politics. Bilateral cooperation between the two biggest global emitters should boost negotiations at #COP26. Now we must find the global deal that keeps 1.5 degrees alive.

— Frans Timmermans (@F__Timmermans) November 10, 2021

China agreed to phase down coal consumption from 2025 to 2030 as part of its 15th five year plan – a critical document which sets the direction of economic development – and “make best efforts to accelerate this work”.

The joint statement commits both sides to further collaborate on electrification of end-use sectors, the deployment of technologies such as carbon capture and storage and air capture and the integration of renewable energy on the grid.

Both sides said they would submit their 2035 national climate targets in 2025. Discussions on the time period climate plans should cover after 2030 remains one of the last unresolved issues of the Paris Agreement rulebook, with negotiators split between favouring five and 10-year cycles.

Yamide Dagnet, of the World Resources Institute, said the move could see “a possible deal” for climate plans to cover a five-year period to be struck over the next couple of days.

The post China-US announce deal at Cop26 to accelerate climate action this decade appeared first on Climate Home News.

Xi announced the ¥1.5 billion ($230 million) Kunming Biodiversity Fund to help implement a new framework for protecting nature this decade. He called on other countries to contribute to the fund.

China is presiding over critical UN Convention on Biological Diversity talks, known as Cop15. Countries are negotiating a set of targets and objectives to prevent the destruction of the Earth’s plants and wildlife by 2030. The agreement, which has been compared to the Paris Agreement for nature, is expected to be finalised in Kunming, China, in April-May next year.

“The new environmental protection targets we set need to be ambitious, on the one hand, and pragmatic and balanced on the other, so as to make the global environmental governance system fairer and more equitable,” Xi told the meeting in Kunming via video link.

“Faced with the dual tasks of economic recovery and environmental protection, developing countries need help and support,” he said.

Xi further announced the creation of national parks covering an area of 230,000 square kilometers.

Countries failing to protect forests, 7 years after New York declaration

In a statement, Greenpeace East Asia said the Kunming Biodiversity Fund “should jump start an urgently needed conversation on biodiversity finance”, adding that “Cop15 needs to see donor countries from the developed world contributing in this regard”.

“Finance and a strong implementation mechanism should be the biggest legacy of China’s CBD presidency. Our planet needs not just another set of targets on paper, but their actual fulfilment.”

Greenpeace welcomed the establishment of national parks. “China’s domestic efforts in setting up natural reserve systems should help it to spearhead the march towards a goal to protect 30% of land by 2030” – one of the global targets up for negotiation.

There was no climate announcement but President Xi said China “will release implementation plans for peaking carbon dioxide emissions in key areas and sectors as well as a series of supporting measures”.

As part of the G20, Beijing signed a ministerial statement in July stating that it intended “to update or communicate an ambitious [2030 climate plan] by Cop26” but it is yet to do so, with three weeks to the UN climate summit in Glasgow, UK.

Xi made no mention of when these plans will be published. Li Shuo, a long-standing observer of China in the climate talks, told Climate Home News the timing for their release remains “very unclear” but “the good news is it will be out before Cop, so we only have less than 20 days”.

The post Xi Jinping announces biodiversity fund to help developing nations protect nature appeared first on Climate Home News.

Climate analysts are concerned that the power shortages, which have been attributed to environmental policies by many media outlets, could lead to a backlash against climate action. 

Factories, owned by suppliers to companies including Apple and Tesla in the northeastern cities of Shenyang and Dalian, have been hit as provinces have been forced to ration power supplies. People in northeast China have said on social media that they are without heating and that lifts and traffic lights are not working.

Citizens and businesses are calling on the government to increase coal imports to allow businesses to continue operating and keep lights on. Han Jun, governor of the affected Jilin province, has said China should source more coal from Mongolia, Indonesia and Russia.

Following the Covid-19 lockdowns, China’s coal consumption has skyrocketed. This is partly due to the government launching a large number of construction projects to stimulate the economy, Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told Climate Home News. This has not increased electricity prices, which are regulated, but has led to surging coal prices and forced many power plants to cut back on purchasing coal to avoid running a loss, he said.

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According to Goldman Sachs, as much as 44% of China’s industrial activity has been impacted by the power shortages. The bank said on Tuesday that it was cutting its GDP growth forecast for China to 7.8%, from the previous 8.2%.

China gets 60% of its electricity from burning coal.

The power cuts have fueled misleading reports that environmental policies are to blame, rather than the high coal prices, analysts told Climate Home News.

The Chinese government announced earlier this month that it will introduce tougher punishments for regions that fail to meet targets aimed at cutting energy intensity. 

“Statements by China’s grid operators have clearly attributed the cuts to high coal prices and low availability, but a lot of media stories have sought to link the [power cuts] to energy consumption control targets that a lot of provinces have struggled to meet this year,” Myllyvirta said. “This looks a lot like an attempt by the opponents of China’s climate policies and targets to make hay out of the situation.” 

Merkel’s legacy: a robust diplomat who surrendered to coal and cars back home

“It’s problematic to say the least. It may well trigger a backlash against strong climate action and put climate efforts in peril,” Dimitri De Boer, who heads ClientEarth’s China office, told Climate Home News.

“This power shortage is not helping. People think they cannot do without coal,” said De Boer, adding it has highlighted the need for “an orderly climate transition where economic growth can continue and people’s livelihoods can continue to improve.”

“This episode is risky in that sense,” he said. “We want to see a win-win transition.”

Yan Qin, lead carbon analyst at Refinitiv, said “fossil fuel lobbyists will use this opportunity to argue for slacker emissions reduction targets for the provinces” in China’s 14th five year plan. The policy document sets out an 18% reduction target for CO2 intensity from 2021-2025.

Regulators are expected to intervene soon, added Qin, noting that they do not have many options available. “One would be to increase coal mine output at Inner Mongolia and Shaanxi as quickly as possible. The second would be to subsidise coal prices for power plants so that more of them are willing to operate,” she said. 

The situation is unlikely to improve in the short term, especially with winter around the corner, she warned. “In the scenarios of extreme cold snap and low renewables output, China can see risks of power shortages again.”

In the short term it is essential that coal supply is increased to restore power supply, said Myllyvirta. “In the longer term, the rational response would be to dramatically increase investment in clean energy to reduce the vulnerability to such supply shocks,” he said.

The post China’s power crunch could fuel anti-climate backlash, analysts warn appeared first on Climate Home News.

For years, China has been the biggest public financer of foreign coal, particularly in rapidly-growing Asian economies, but has slowed down recently.

President Xi’s speech was translated as: “China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad.”

The announcement was celebrated by campaigners. Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air analyst Lauri Myllyvirta told Climate Home News: “This is a massive shift in China’s stance and leaves no international financing for new coal”.

Refinitiv analyst Yan Qin said: “This has long been expected. It was already in the April US-China climate talks. But it still sends a strong message domestically mostly, just like the stricter coal policy Xi announced in his Earth Day speech“.

Through its “belt and road” agenda, China has invested over $43bn of dollars worth of coal power projects since 2000, mainly in Asia and southern Africa.

Where China’s coal finance has gone (Photo: Endcoal.org/Screenshot)

But its enthusiasm for coal has waned since President Xi announced a surprise 2060 net zero target for China at last year’s UN General Assembly.

In December 2020, China’s environment ministry worked with NGOs to float a ban on coal power investments abroad.

In the first half of 2021, China did not fund any coal power projects abroad and Chinese bank ICBC sat down with global campaigners to discuss withdrawing from a coal plant in Zimbabwe.

Myllyvirta said that Chinese banks had been distancing themselves from new coal “due to guidance from the top” but that nevertheless “it’s very important that this is formally announced and locked in”.

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Chatham House China analyst Bernice Lee agreed that it was “good that it is now formalised”.

As well as political pressure from within China, coal financers were facing a lack of demand abroad. Myllyvirta said that “no one is looking to build new coal at the moment so this has been easy to do”.

Countries which previously welcomed Chinese-funded coal plants, like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, have announced they are moving away from coal.

China has been subject to international pressure over coal. In July, the Italian hosts of this year’s G20 tried to get countries to agree to end finance for foreign coal but China, India and Russia resisted.

Seven countries join US and EU in methane reduction pledge

In two trips to China this year, US climate envoy John Kerry asked his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua for a foreign coal moratorium.

It is not quite game over for coal. While China is the biggest public backer of coal, Boston University research found Chinese finance was only involved in 13% of coal power capacity that was operational or under development outside China between 2013 and 2019. Much of the rest came from US institutional investors like Vanguard, BlackRock and the Capital Group.

Myllyvirta said the details of the policy change would be important. “Chinese banks and firms play a major role in public and private debt financing, equity investment, equipment supply etcetera. Which of these are included?” he asked.

E3G China analyst Byford Tsang said that, while this was “a major step forward in China’s climate policy”, China must now tackle its domestic coal fleet.

China still hosts over half of the world’s operating coal fleet, he said, which is unaffected by Xi’s announcement.

The post President Xi declares end to Chinese support for new coal power abroad appeared first on Climate Home News.

The 5.2GW of coal power approved is a 79% decline on the coal capacity approved in same period of last year.

Li Danqing, a Beijing-based project leader for Greenpeace East Asia, said Chinese decisionmakers were receiving “mixed signals on coal”.

She said that since President Xi Jinping announced new 2030 climate targets in April, local governments have slowed approvals for new polluting power plants but “are clearly still anticipating financial support on coal”.

Of the 5.2GW approved, 3.3 GW is from three major coal-fired power stations in the provinces of Anhui and the coal-dependent northern province of Shaanxi.

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The provinces mainly justified the projects on the basis of “securing long-term electricity supply”. Some parts of the country experienced electricity shortages last winter and this summer.

This data is from 27 provincial governments’ lists of “key projects” – a tool to apply for funding from the central government.

Being on the key project list is a near-guarantee of support from Beijing, according to Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air analyst Lauri Myllyvirta.

He told Climate Home News that the initiatives on the list are funded by state-owned banks. “Getting included on the major project list either means you already have the initial planning permit or it is a shoo-in”, he said.

While provincial governments have permitting authority on industrial projects, the central government can choose to intervene.

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Two of the three major power plants in Anhui and Shaanxi were financed by state-owned enterprises.

Greenpeace suggested state-owned firms could be stepping up as private companies back off from financing new coal power generation.

For its recovery from Covid-19, China is relying on “an enormous wave of construction and industrial projects” Myllyvirta told Climate Home News.

China’s gross domestic product (GDP), energy consumption and production of steel, cement and aluminium increased in 2020 despite the pandemic.

The central government did not allow all the provinces’ polluting projects this year though.

Myllyvirta said that nine provinces had approvals of new ‘high emissions’ projects suspended because they increased their CO2 intensity in the first half of the year.

For the first time, China did not back any coal power projects outside the country in the first half of 2021.

But domestically, the provincial key project lists still includes 104.8 GW of coal capacity in the pipeline, over four times Germany’s total coal power capacity.

The post Chinese coal power investment slows, with 24 projects approved this year appeared first on Climate Home News.

Henan’s capital Zhengzhou was hit by 201.3mm of rain in a single hour on Tuesday, exceeding the Chinese record set in 1975, according to the provincial met office. Some weather stations recorded more rain over four days than they typically get in an entire year.

Twelve passengers died as rainwater filled up Line 5 of Zhengzhou’s subway system. Footage shot by survivors shows commuters waist-deep in water holding tight to their carriages’ handrails and perching on low walls at the edge of the subway as water gushes through the tunnel.

BREAKING – Heavy rain pounded the central Chinese province of Henan, bursting the banks of major rivers, flooding the streets of a dozen cities including Zhengzhou and trapping subway passengers waist-high in floodwaters pic.twitter.com/JSxYhz1k5a

— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) July 20, 2021

Above ground, several videos show people swept away by water being rescued and cars being washed away. Crops and buildings were destroyed, food ruined and residents evacuated.

5. video thread of Henan flood
A drowning women secured by other residents from flood pic.twitter.com/2yxFWhdYQm

— 巴丢草 Badiucao (@badiucao) July 21, 2021

According to a tunnel engineer who spoke to privately owned Chinese magazine Caixin, tunnels are usually designed to withstand what were judged to be once-in-fifty-year rain events at the time of construction. Making them able to withstand rarer rainfall events is more expensive.

Caixin reported that the storm’s path was unpredictable and station staff may not have been able to deploy sandbags and steel gates to keep the rainwater from the steps of the subway stations.

Once it has entered the subway through stairs, lifts and ventilation grates, the engineer said it can only be removed through drainage and electric pumps. This is particularly true for circular subway lines like Zhengzhou’s Line 5, where water can’t exit at the end of the line.

Zhengzhou subway map

Water in subways presents a risk of electrocution – but losing electric power turns off the subway’s ventilation system and drainage pumps, Caixin reported.

The carnage comes nine years to the day after 79 people were killed in a rainstorm in Beijing, collapsing roofs and downing power lines.

Climate change has made flooding more common and more severe. As the air heats up, it can hold more water vapour, which is released as rain.

2/3: A woman rescued in flood waters in Zhengzhou, Henan (video from WeChat). pic.twitter.com/6fOblgl5OL

— Bill Birtles (@billbirtles) July 20, 2021

This trend is particularly pronounced in the mid-northern latitudes, including most of China and Europe, where flooding killed almost 200 people last week.

As the Arctic warms faster than the rest of the world, the temperature difference has decreased, weakening the typical air movement from west to east. This means weather hangs around for longer, explained Stefan Rahmstorf, chair of earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. One day of heavy rain can become two or three, overwhelming a city.

Chinese politicians, state and social media have largely ignored the link between climate change and the flooding. Greenpeace East Asia’s Li Shuo told Climate Home News that coverage had focussed on the severity of the flooding and how to deal with the aftermath.

“But,” he said, “there is a general sense that something very unusual is happening. This, together with Germany and North America[n heatwaves] will wake people up.”

He said China’s climate action has been traditionally been based on economic and diplomatic considerations. “I don’t think these will change,” he said, but in time “impact and risk have the potential to become a new one”.

A 2020 academic study said that, despite the increasing popularity of subways and the increasing risks to them of climate change, not enough research had been done into the risk of flooding to subways.

The study suggested that hydraulic barriers could help prevent flooding, as could raising the height of pedestrian access points to the subway.

This story was changed after publication to remove an incorrect conversion from mm to metres.

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The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) said it would no longer finance the 2.8GW Sengwa coal power plant, according to an email summary of the meeting shared between campaigners and seen by Bloomberg.

The Go Clean ICBC coalition of environmentalists, mostly from countries hosting ICBC coal projects, formed in January to urge the bank to switch its investments to clean energy like solar and wind power. The coalition was offered a meeting with bank officials on 16 June, according to a briefing note shared by CNRG Zim on Twitter.

Summarising the discussion to fellow campaigners by email two days later, 350.org reported ICBC had said the Sengwa plant was a “bad plan due to environmental problems”. Nathalia Clark of 350.org clarified to Climate Home that there had been no official communication from ICBC and negotiations were ongoing.

If confirmed, it would be unusual among a wave of cancellations of Chinese-backed coal projects in appearing to be driven by the bank’s policy, rather than hurdles in the host country.

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Lauri Myllyvirta, a China-watcher from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, told Climate Home News: “This is a first case where a Chinese bank has proactively pulled the plug.”

ICBC has been signalling for a number of years that it will strengthen its risk assessment and sustainability standards, he said. “In that sense, it does seem likely that this is some kind of a precedent – although that doesn’t mean they are going to drop every single coal project.”

China’s overseas coal finance pipeline (Photo: Global Energy Monitor)

E3G analyst Byford Tsang said the news was “an addition to a series of signals on the shifting tides of Chinese overseas coal we’ve witnessed recently”.

Last month, ICBC’s chief economist said the bank would develop a roadmap and timeline to phase out coal. Meanwhile the Chinese government signed a green development partnership with 28 Asia Pacific countries in the “belt and road initiative”.

Last December, the Chinese ministry of environment floated a ban on state support for overseas coal power plants.

But, Tsang said, “China has yet to make a formal commitment to end all public support to coal power overseas, unlike other major financiers of international coal such as Japan or South Korea“.

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E3G analyst Leo Roberts told Climate Home that Southern African countries like Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Kenya are now at an energy crossroads. “Do they pursue expensive, polluting fossil fuel generation, or leapfrog to renewables? The drying up of international coal finance represents a major opportunity for the international community to support the latter through diplomatic outreach, clean energy finance and technical assistance,” he said.

ICBC officials confirmed to campaigners in the meeting they would not pursue a proposed coal power plant in Lamu, Kenya after an environmental court took away the project’s permit.

Before the latest cancellations, the ICBC was China’s biggest backer of coal power plants in other countries. According to Global Energy Monitor data, it is involved in 12.5GW including plants in Mozambique, Bosnia-Herzegovnia, Turkey and Vietnam.

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The idea of building a coal power plant on the Sengwa coalfield was first proposed in 1997 but successive developers failed to get it off the ground.

Zimbabwean firm RioZim has been trying to build it for over ten years and, in April 2020, its hopes were boosted when ICBC signed a formal expression of interest.

It is now seeking alternative financing but, with many banks now refusing to finance coal, the chances are slim.

Only 40% of Zimbabweans have access to electricity. That electricity comes roughly equally from hydropower and coal, according to the International Energy Agency.

The project would reportedly have included a 250 km pipeline bringing water from Lake Kariba, which straddles the Zambian border and is the largest reservoir in the world.

Both nations rely on the lake for hydroelectric power. The lake’s water level has regularly been low, leading to rolling blackouts across Zimbabwe and Zambia.

Hippos on Lake Kariba (Photo: Flavio Jota de Paula/Flickr)

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