The US and China are “committed to working together” on the urgent issue of climate change, the two parties said in a joint statement on Saturday after a visit to US climate envoy John Kerry in Shanghai.
“The United States and China are committed to working with each other and with other countries to tackle the climate crisis, which must be addressed with the seriousness and urgency it demands,” said Kerry and China’s special envoy. for Climate Change Xie Zhenhua.
Kerry, the former US Secretary of State, was the first government official, President Joe Biden, to visit China. This indicates that the two parties can work together on the global challenge, despite sky-high tensions in several other areas.
The joint statement lists several avenues of cooperation between the US and China, the two largest economies in the world that together account for almost half of the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change.
It emphasizes ‘the improvement of their respective actions and cooperation on multilateral processes, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement’.
The countries also agreed to discuss specific “concrete” emission reduction actions, including energy storage, carbon capture and hydrogen, and agreed to take action to maximize funding for developing countries to switch to low-carbon energy sources.
The statement said both countries were “looking forward” to Biden’s forthcoming virtual climate summit and shared it with the aim of the summit to increase global climate ambition on “mitigation, adaptation and support on the way to COP 26 in Glasgow”.
Biden invited 40 world leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, to the April 22-23 summit. The US and other countries are expected to announce more ambitious national targets for reducing carbon emissions before or during the meeting, along with financial pledges for climate efforts by less affluent countries.
However, it is still unclear how much Kerry’s visit will promote cooperation between the United States and China on climate issues. When Kerry was still in Shanghai, Foreign Minister Le Yucheng indicated that China was unlikely to make new promises during the summit.
“For a large country with 1.4 billion people, these goals are not easily achieved,” Le said in an interview with The Associated Press in Beijing.
“Some countries are asking China to achieve its goals sooner. I’m afraid it’s not very realistic. ”
On the question of whether Xi would join the summit, Le said ‘the Chinese side is actively studying the matter’.
During a video conference with German and French leaders on Friday, Xi also said that climate change “should not become a geopolitical disk, a target for attack on other countries or an excuse for trade barriers”, although he called for closer cooperation on the issue, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
Li Shuo, senior climate adviser for environmental group Greenpeace, viewed the joint statement positively, saying China could soon respond to a new US promise with its own, building on the “momentum” of the Shanghai talks.
“I think the statement is as positive as politics would allow: it sends a very unequivocal message that there will be cooperation on this particular issue (China and the United States). “It was not a message we could accept before the meetings in Shanghai,” Li said.
Biden made climate a top priority and showed the page of his predecessor Donald Trump, who was now in line with the fossil fuel industry.
The US president rejoined the 2015 agreement in Paris, which Kerry negotiated when he was secretary of state, and pledged nations to take action to keep temperature rises no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. .