China on Friday released a draft summary of its 14th five-year plan, the most important document that not only addresses the country’s economic development, but also has major implications for global carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.
The new plan’s 2025 emissions targets reflect a continuing contradiction between China’s short- and long-term climate goals.
In the long run, China has expressed a strong commitment to climate action. President Xi Jinping surprised the world in September last year when he announced that China intends to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Climate scientists have called for countries to reach the target by 2050, but it was still an important step forward for China – the first time the country has made any formal commitment to harm its emissions.
And yet, while Xi made the announcement, CO2 emissions in China skyrocketed. Like the rest of the world, the pandemic in early 2020 caused economic activity in China to decline sharply. But after the pandemic was quickly brought under control within its borders, the Chinese government funnel stimulus dollars in the highly polluting construction and manufacturing sectors, which supplement steel and cement production. As a result, China’s emissions are estimated to have risen 1.5 percent in 2020, even the initial decline.
“China’s economic recovery from the pandemic so far has been anything but green,” said Li Shuo, a senior global policy adviser. for Greenpeace East Asia, said during a press conference on Monday.
Now, with the announcement of the 14th five-year plan targets, the Chinese government indicates that the country’s emissions growth is likely to slow slightly from recent months, but according to analysts, will continue for at least the next five years.
On the one hand, the increasing emphasis on green development in China’s plans, rather than the historical focus on GDP, shows that the Communist Party sees a strong national interest in reducing emissions over time. However, these latest climate goals do not rise to the level required by the global scientific consensus.
Let’s look at where China needs to be by 2025 to be in line with the Paris Agreement goals – and the reasons why it is still climbing on climate action.
The deficit of the 14th Five Year Plan’s climate ambition
The 14th five-year plan sets out a number of key climate goals that will guide the country over the coming years. Together, these targets suggest that China will continue to pursue climate action, but it does not amount to a new era of great aspirations.
‘As the first five-year plan after China’s commitment to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, the 14th FYP is expected to show strong climate ambition. However, the draft plan presented today does not seem to live up to expectations, “said Zhang Shuwei, chief economist at Draworld Environment Research Center, a consulting firm in Beijing. “The international community expected China’s climate policy to ‘jump’, but in reality it is still creeping up.”
Prominent Chinese climate advocates hoped the plan would make clear when exactly China plans to achieve its carbon emissions, and at what level, by introducing a ‘carbon roof’. Instead, the plan uses a more complex measure included in previous plans – reducing the “carbon intensity”, which is carbon emissions per unit of GDP. This target is set at 18 percent, the same as the previous five-year plan.
Usually, the government also sets an annual GDP growth target for the five-year period, which can be used to recalculate the absolute emissions growth. But this year, probably due to the continuing uncertainties associated with the global economic recovery from the pandemic, China has only a one-time target for GDP to grow more than 6 percent.
Taken together, these two targets indicate that China’s emissions will continue to rise by at least 1.9 percent in the coming year. If GDP grows by at least 3.9 percent annually over the next four years, China’s emissions could increase slowly, while still meeting the new carbon-reducing target, Zhang calculate.
In the worst case scenario, if China continues its energy-intensive recovery from the pandemic and GDP growth continues for several years, emissions growth may even accelerate after slowing down over the past five years, according to Lauri Myllyvirta, chief analyst at the Center for Energy and Clean Air Research (CREA), an international think tank for the environment. (China carbon emissions have grown by about 1.7 percent annually over the past five years.)
He also noted that one of China’s other important climate goals, a restriction on overall energy consumption, has not been included in this latest plan, which removes a handrail on emissions growth.
What does this mean for global climate goals? According to a joint study published by the Asia Society Policy Institute and Climate Analytics in November, China must reach its emissions as soon as possible, and certainly by 2025, to be in line with the Paris Agreement. Currently, China has only committed to reaching its emissions before 2030.
The other main climate goal of the 14th five-year plan is slightly more hopeful. China has set a slightly more courageous goal for renewable energy: 20 percent of its energy should come from non-fossil sources by 2025. This is a slight acceleration over the non-fossil energy expansion in the last five-year plan period, during which the share of 12.3 to 15.9 percent.
However, again, this is not entirely in line with China’s long-term climate goals and the Paris Agreement. According to CREA’s analysis, China must extract 25 percent of its energy from non-fossil sources by 2025 to be straight to reach the 2060 target.
Overall, these targets point to modest progress from the world’s largest issuer in the coming years. However, it is noteworthy that historical goals have been overestimated in five-year plans. All of the climate targets in the 13th five-year plan were exceeded.
“Given China’s habit of undertaking five-year plans too little and delivering too long, these targets will hopefully protect against an increase in further emissions growth,” Li, Greenpeace East Asia, said. “But to tackle the climate crisis, China needs to bring its emissions growth to a much slower level and flatten the emissions curve early in the next five-year period.”
China will face further tests of its climate ambition this year
Although the 14th five-year plan is an important measure of China’s commitment to tackle climate change in the short term, the country’s intentions will be further clarified in the coming months.
As is typical, by the end of the year, China will also announce specific five-year energy and electricity plans – and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment will publish for the first time a five-year climate plan and an emission point. These plans contain more details on some of the key outstanding issues that will determine China’s emissions.
The biggest question is whether China will reverse its coal consumption, which increased slightly last year, even during the pandemic. Environmentalists have become increasingly concerned as China builds only 38.4 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plant in 2020 – three-quarters of the new coal construction worldwide.
What happens internationally may also play a role in shaping China’s emissions. The Biden government has pledged to reprimand US world leaders on climate change and plans to host a global climate summit on Earth Day in April. In the run-up, the administration said it will release a new, more ambitious 2030 target for the US.
It could potentially free China from also raising its 2030 targets. In December, President Xi announced new targets, which experts say were not strong enough. However, they have not yet been formalized under the Paris Agreement, so there is still room for China to make its targets more aggressive by the deadline: the next major round of UN climate talks to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November .
But with ongoing tensions in US-China relations, analysts are uncertain about how the two countries will now be able to work together on climate change.
So far, the 14th five-year plan has shown that China is not yet ready to put climate change much higher in the short term.
“It has opened a battle between these two sides of the aisle,” Li said, pointing to the divide between advocates for continued industrial growth and those fighting for climate progress in China. “Instead of answering the most important climate-related questions, it raised more questions this morning.”