China Commits to Full Climate Action Plan
- Editor OGN Daily
- 59 minutes ago
- 2 min read
The world’s biggest polluter has committed to producing a comprehensive emissions reduction plan by November, covering - for the first time - all economic sectors and greenhouse gases.
China will continue to push forward on the climate crisis, Xi Jinping has said. The Chinese president was attending a closed-door virtual meeting with the UN secretary general, António Guterres, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and about a dozen other heads of state and government to discuss the climate crisis. The Guardian reports that Xi did not name the US or Trump but made apparent reference to them while noting that China had “built the world’s largest and fastest-growing renewable energy systems as well as the largest and most complete new energy industrial chain”.
President Xi Jinping also said that “no matter how the international situation changes, China will not slow down its efforts to address climate change”. China previously committed to “carbon neutrality before 2060”, but that net zero target did not cover methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. The country has since dramatically scaled its clean-tech sector, with some experts predicting that its emissions have already peaked.
Xi’s comments have been welcomed by some observers, particularly in light of recent backsliding by the US - the world’s second largest emitter - but it remains to be seen how ambitious the targets will be. China has committed to publishing its emissions reduction plan before the COP30 climate conference in Brazil in November.
“China’s renewable energy pipeline is two times larger than the rest of the world,” Li Shuo, the director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Policy Institute in Washington DC, said last year. “But the question we should increasingly ask ourselves is, how come the rest of the world is so slow?”
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