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Look for China to make new investments in forestry and deeper cuts in carbon intensity when it delivers its tardy climate pledge to the United Nations "soon," a Chinese official said in Chicago Tuesday.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Obama signed a climate agreement last November, China pledged to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and to increase its use of non-fossil-fuel energy sources to 20 percent.
But that was only half of China's climate strategy, said Zou Ji, deputy director general of China's National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, at a U.S.-China Forum Tuesday at the University of Chicago.
"We have two announced targets already: one is a peaking year around 2030—and we will make our effort to make it happen as early as possible—and the other one is the share of non-fossil-fuel energy," Zou said. "The other two, we are working very hard for the moment."
Those two, according to Zou, will be:
1. Deeper reductions in carbon intensity. Carbon intensity is a measure of carbon emissions per dollar of gross domestic product, a metric that allows China to demonstrate movement away from carbon-emitting fuels even as total emissions continue to rise with economic growth. At the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009, China pledged to reduce carbon intensity 40-45 percent by 2020. China has not submitted emissions data to the UN since 2005, but on Tuesday, Madame Fu Ying, chairperson of the foreign affairs committee of China's National People's Congress, said China had already reduced carbon intensity 33.8 percent by 2014.
2. Greater carbon sink from forestry. Expect China to expand forests in a land that has been deforested for millennia , and to tinker with existing forests so they more effectively capture atmospheric carbon. China pledged in 2009 to expand its forests by 40 million hectares and forest-stock volume by 1.3 billion cubic meters by 2020. According to the World Bank, China's forest cover has increased since then from 21.7 percent of land area in 2009 to 22.6 percent in 2012, the most recent year for which the bank has data. China's reforestation program was ambitious even before the Copenhagen summit, but some observers have questioned its long-term success because China has relied on fast-growing species that are non-native and unlikely to thrive.
All four goals will be included in China's "Intended Nationally Determined Contribution," or INDC, the pledge submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ahead of the UN's December summit in Paris, Zou said. Chinese officials had promised the pledge would be submitted in the first quarter of 2015, but it has not yet appeared in the UN portal.
"I'm sorry for the moment it has not been published officially," Zou said. "I think it will be published soon."
"We tried to develop a package of targets for 2030 to ensure our development path towards the direction of low-carbon development. This is the most important thing, I think, not only for China itself but for the whole world. Then the next question is how to achieve those targets."
Madame Fu Ying reminded the audience, as Chinese diplomats often do, that climate mitigation is not China's first priority.
"For a big country like China, which is still confronted with considerable poverty, development remains the primary objective," she said, "but China is determined to act responsibly and is willing to join hands with the U.S. and all other counties to effectively tackle climate change."
Fu and Zou spoke to about 250 people at the "U.S. China-Forum: Focus on Climate Change" sponsored by the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, an annual event designed to spur research collaboration between Chinese and University of Chicago researchers. The public event was also webcast. This year’s forum was hosted by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) and the Paulson Institute.
Paulson Institute founder Hank Paulson, the former Treasury secretary, said governments deal better with immediate crises than long-term ones, and they solve problems better at the national level than the international. Climate change is a long-term, international problem, he noted, so agreements between nations, like the one between Obama and Xi, may prove more effective than UN agreements.
"I don't want to sound anti-egalitarian," Paulson said, "but my own view… I think if you can get a number of major economies to get together and take a lead, I think the rest fall into line. I think it's really hard when you have large numbers of nations with really diverse interests."
Fu Ying concurred that the Obama-Xi agreement "sent a very good signal to the world" that "will pave the way for Paris."
"China-U.S. cooperation sets a good example and provides good incentives for the Paris conference to be a success," she said, "and we hope this will prompt other countries to take right decisions toward a binding agreement."
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