Lessons From China’s Climate Change Strategy

by Admin (Posted on June 15, 2024)

By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi

For a long time, China was known for relegating the challenge of combating climate change to “developed countries.” It did not consider itself among them and thus stood alongside developing countries to demand that wealthy, developed countries address the issue. As one of the largest CO2 emitters worldwide, it did not take long to backtrack its stance and become a world leader in green technology and climate-change mitigation. The nation’s commitment now is to shrink carbon emissions to safe levels by 2030 and realise carbon neutrality before 2060.

China has come a long way on this journey involving devising various strategies and implementing several policies to mitigate long-term effects of climate change. In 2004, they started experimenting with the “Green GDP” policy. The idea behind this policy was to deduct resource and environmental costs from the GDP of the country. This is how they began greening their economic policies and promoting nature conservation in their economic development model.

The “Green GDP” initiative is an environmental index applied while assessing an area’s GDP.  China uses it to evaluate economic performance by considering indicators such as energy consumption, energy reduction and emission intensity of major pollutants per 10,000 yuan of GDP. This is an environmentally smart and responsible method of measuring economic performance of the country without blindsiding oneself only to GDP growth.

Over time, China has improved assessment criteria by relying on indicators which pay attention to people’s livelihood, improvement of social conditions and monitoring ecological benefits. This should be the way to go for countries that aren’t yet implementing similar models.

In a more drastic move in 2013, China unveiled an Air Pollution Prevention and Action Plan, termed the “Air Ten.” By this, it passed strong regulations on pollution and restructured industries to achieve better air quality, especially in Beijing which is usually heavily affected by air pollution. By 2021, Beijing’s air quality had improved greatly with the city’s average PM2.5 reading dropping by 52.9% within five years.

President Xi Jinping also introduced the “new normal” concept in 2014. This denoted that government had appreciated the need to improve the quality of China’s economic development since it had attained a higher stage of development and outgrown the age of primitive acceleration of growth. Xi famously remarked that; “the carrying capacity of the environment has reached, or is close to, its upper limit and it is necessary to promote a new way of green, low-carbon and circular development”.

He noted that it was no longer sustainable for China to pursue the old economic path of extensive economic development and warned that such a path would be a dead end.

Therefore, China now pursues green development as a necessary means to mitigate climate catastrophe while maintaining economic development.

Additionally, Xi conceptualized the “ecological civilization” theory. He articulated the principles that must be followed in order to promote ecological civilization including; maintaining harmonious coexistence between man and nature and working together to build a global ecological civilization among others.

He stated: “We must deeply involve ourselves in global environmental governance, enhance our voice and influence in the global environmental governance system, actively guide the direction of change in the international order and form solutions for world environmental protection and sustainable development.”

But that would not be possible if corruption had continued to eat up China’s environment and energy sectors. For instance, officials in the coal industry conspired in the destruction of grasslands by coal mines in the Qilianshan Muli area and the illegal construction of villas in the Qinling Protected Area.

To confront this challenge, President Xi founded the Central Ecological and Environmental Inspection Team (CEEIT) in 2015 to supervise provincial and central ministries. Over 6,000 senior officials at various levels of government were arrested for corruption and have been held accountable for several environmental and energy-related cases.

This is tremendous progress – from denying contribution and responsibility for climate change – to holding large numbers of public servants for complacency in environmental degradation. China’s transformation ideologically and proactively in combating climate change and assuming global leadership in green technology should challenge all countries slacking on this urgent global challenge to stand up to the task.

Nnanda is a senior research fellow at the Development Watch Centre.

nnandakizito@dwcug.org

 

---