Though experts have pegged China as the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter for well over a year, it was only two weeks ago that the government first openly admitted China’s emissions have caught up with the US (just barely, they insist).
This acknowledgment came the day after a senior Chinese climate policy official said rich nations should earmark a wopping 1% of their GDP to help the developing world tackle climate change. Swift to follow was an international climate conference in Beijing, run jointly by China’s government and the UN, which ambitiously proposed a new international agency to push technology transfer. Jane Qiu reports the meeting’s outcome in Nature this week (subscription required).
In short, it’s not just the rather ghastly Christmas tree in my hairdresser’s window that’s signaling December is around the corner. Next month ushers in the UN climate conference in Poznan, Poland, a major stop on the road between Bali and the Son of Kyoto treaty to be hammered out next year in Copenhagen. The formerly reticent China seems to be after a louder voice at the table.
“There’s growing external pressure on China and also its own problems with energy and the environment, and these factors are coming together to make it more active and focused on climate change,” said Goerild Heggelund, an expert on Chinese climate change policy at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway.
President-elect Barack Obama’s entry into the White House early next year, vowing greater action on climate change, will also lift expectations of China, said Guan Qingyou, a climate policy researcher at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
“With U.S. policy changes, there will also be more pressure on China to show initiative,” he said. “Eyes will be on us.”
The 1% of GDP demanded last month, Qiu says, would cash out at US$284 billion – more than twice what the eight largest economies pledged to the climate-challenged developing world at July’s G8 summit. Even if the North agreed to such a sum – or the 0.5% or 0.7% the Chinese have previously suggested – countries heading toward a global recession seem unlikely to improve on their poor records of delivering foreign aid.
Perhaps more UN-friendly is the new plan for stepping up the transfer of technologies that would allow the South to produce clean energy and adapt to unavoidable climate change. Writes Qiu:
Under the framework proposed in brainstorming sessions at the Beijing conference, the new inter-government agency would be an independent body able to make and implement decisions and monitor compliance. It would oversee and verify mitigation targets of developing countries, identify barriers to technology transfer, and propose countermeasures. Developed countries would commit to providing it with a steady stream of income for its primary operating budget, possibly supplemented with money from the private sector and other sources.
(China, it should be noted, is already doing plenty with the renewable energy tech it’s got – more than any other country, according to one report. This would be more heartening if it didn’t also lead the world in producing and consuming coal.)
A proposal on the technology transfer agency will go to Poznan. But the big push forward won’t succeed unless China manages to break its climate-policy stalemate with wealthy countries, in which each side refuses to take action before the other. China’s Premier Wen Jiabao opened the Beijing conference with the admonition, “Developed countries shoulder the duty and responsibility to tackle climate change and should alter their unsustainable lifestyle.” On the other hand (from the Nature story):
Many representatives from developed countries say they first want to see developing countries make a firm commitment to emissions-reduction targets. “We are talking about a lot of money here,” says Jukka Uosukainen of Finland’s environment ministry and chair of the Expert Group on Technology Transfer. “There is no point in transferring low-carbon technologies to a country that is actively promoting a high-carbon economy.”
Anna Barnett
Photo: Wangfujing street, Beijing / Wikipedia user Nggsc, Creative Commons license
