By Alessia Amighini, Professor Università del Piemonte Orientale, Co-Head of the Asia Centre at ISPI (Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale)
Sintesi
Questo contributo propone una breve descrizione del ruolo della Cina nel contesto delle politiche e delle negoziazioni sui cambiamenti climatici. Sottolinea come negli ultimi 10 anni la Cina abbia cambiato la sua posizione, assumendo un ruolo di leadeship nel contesto delle negoziazioni e della implementazione di politiche per la riduzione delle emissioni. Ciò è dovuto sia a motivazioni nazionali che internazionali. Sul piano nazionale la Cina sta implementando una rivoluzione green, diventando un leader mondiale in installazione di rinnovabili e mantenendo le emissioni di CO2 relativamente stabili. Sul piano internazionale la posizione di leadership della Cina è anch ein parte dovuta alla uscita degli Stati Uniti dagli Accordi di Parigi.
Since almost a decade, China has been a central player in global climate change policy. China’s engagement to multilateral negotiations changed dramatically from her ambiguous position in the process that eventually led to the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 to her fundamental role in the success of the Paris Agreement in 2015, and to her current claim to become the major advocate of a global governance approach to climate change.
This shift is extremely welcome as China is the world’s great polluter and therefore is essential to the future of the climate on the Earth. China’s CO2 emissions increased from 10.7% of global emissions in 1990 to 22.3% in 2008 and 28% in 2017. Therefore, China has bypassed the US as regards C02 emissions, which went from 46% of US emissions in 1990 to 117% in 2008 and 190% in 2017.
The Chinese shift to a leadership role in climate change policies and negotiations has both domestic and international motivations, and the two are intertwined. On the domestic side, China is undergoing a massive green revolution as a part of her economic and industrial transition to new growth model. On the international side, China has embraced a leading role in global negotiations, partly as a result of the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement. The two sides are intertwined. On the one hand, the country’s international commitment to reduce CO2 emissions reinforces the domestic commitment to respond to the people’s pressure for policies towards a green revolution. The Chinese urban middle class is increasingly discontent not to say rather alarmed by climate change and have increasingly mobilised against air pollution. Therefore, public opinion is a major supporting factor for the urgency by Chinese officials to developed policies that have a positive effect on climate change. On the other hand, the domestic acceleration in the adoption of environment-friendly policies is leveraged internationally to demonstrate the country’s effectiveness at reaching those goals.
The Chinese climate strategy has been substantially reinforced with the 12th and the 13th 5-year plans as long as the transition towards more sustainable growth has led to reconsider environmental sustainability as a key driver for the future. Investing in green sectors, technology and processes is a way to achieve a variety of goals, ranging from the massive reconversion of polluting industries, to the ambition to achieve significant industrial upgrading in the transport sector by leapfrogging other countries into the new electric mobility, to the willingness to decrease its energy dependence.
However, there is a little ambiguity and inconsistency between the way a domestic green revolution is pursued and the specific commitments signed in the Paris agreement. According to the International Energy Agency, China’s CO2 emissions has not increased since 2014 and that total C02 emissions in 2017 were just 1% above the 2014 level, a pace that is much lower than the overall growth rate of the economy. Moreover, the IEA reports that China represented 40% of the global increase in solar and wind energy production in 2017. “China overtook the United States to become the world leader for non-hydro renewables-based electricity generation. Global solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity approached 400 GW by the end of 2017. It was an extraordinary year for solar PV additions in China, with over 50 GW of new capacity, exceeding the combined capacity additions of coal, gas and nuclear, and up from 35 GW in 2016. The new solar PV capacity added in China in 2017 alone is equivalent to the total solar PV capacity of France and Germany combined”.
However, the planned shift to renewable energy sources might not necessarily reduce coal dependency as much as one could expect. Despite China is very aggressive in stating she is cutting coal usage, the coal intensity of electricity production to fuel electric vehicles (EV) might be still high. Projections of coal intensity show that China is slowing down the growth of coal usage, not decreasing it. The new stringent fuel efficiency rules and the license plate lottery in Beijing is incentivising buyers to favour EV purchases, but this is much more intended to achieve blue skies in all of its major cities within three years, to please the urban middle class, and to allow Chinese automakers to sell larger numbers of electric vehicles than to cut coal usage. These producers have been competing domestically with foreign invested firms (joint ventures between Chinese and foreign producers), but now they are acquiring a growing advantage in the EV market. It is not surprising that a drastic shift to EV has occurred exactly at a time when a Chinese industrial capacity has developed in renewables and in new EV, so that now China finds it all the more convenient to lead the global climate change policies, as it is perfectly consistent with her own domestic development objectives.
For a longer reading and coverage of the political factors behind China’s turn toward climate leadership, see Yves Tiberghien (2018), Chinese Global Climate Change Leadership and Its Impact, in Amighini, A. (ed.), China Champion of Which Globalisation?, ISPI.
