China's GHG emissions to peak by 2025

OREANDA-NEWS. June 23, 2015. GHG emissions are much more likely to peak by 2025 than as late as 2030 — the year set as a deadline by president Xi Jinping. But China's emissions could peak even earlier than that and, with comprehensive reform, they could also fall rapidly post-peak, says a London School of Economics study released today — China's "new normal": structural change, better growth, and peak emissions.

If China's emissions did peak around 2020–2025, they would reach a maximum of around 12.5bn–14bn t of CO2 equivalent, the report said. This creates an opportunity for global emissions to be curbed sufficiently to keep within an internationally accepted global temperature rise of 2°C, it said.

China's international commitment to peak CO2 emissions around 2030 should be seen as "a conservative upper limit" from a government that prefers to "under-promise and over-deliver", the study said. The report was co-written by UK climate economist Nicholas Stern and policy analyst Fergus Green from the London School of Economics' (LSE) Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

China is decisively pursuing better quality economic growth that will slow — and eventually lower — the country's GHG emissions, because it requires structural changes that will cut consumption of fossil fuels, particularly coal, across power generation, industry and transport.

Under a development model called the "new normal", the country will pursue structural changes that will bring still-strong but lower economic growth of around 7pc/yr over the next five years. But that growth will be of "a much better quality in terms of its social distribution and impact on the natural environment", the report said.

In the transport sector, China's oil consumption and CO2 emissions will continue growing over at least the next decade, from a relatively low base today. "But existing and planned policy measures would result in more moderate growth than projected in many studies over the past decade, with strong potential for future mitigation," the report said.

China's coal consumption fell by nearly 3pc last year to less than 4bn t and fell by 3.5pc year on year in the first quarter, according to preliminary official statistics. By contrast, in 2000-10 it grew at around 9–10pc/yr. "It is now possible to say with confidence that coal use in China has reached a structural maximum and begun to plateau," the report said.

Stagnation in Chinese coal use was a key factor in a stalling of global CO2 emissions growth in 2014 and marked the first time in 40 years in which there was a halt or reduction in global CO2 emissions that was not the result of an economic downturn, according to the IEA.

There is a 10-year lag between peak coal and peak CO2 emissions, the New Climate Economy project of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate found. If this assumed 10-year lag is correct, Chinese emissions can be expected to peak in the mid-2020s, the LSE report said.

"It is important that governments, businesses and citizens everywhere understand this fundamental change in China, reflect on their own ambitions on climate change and adjust upwards their expectations about the global market potential for low-carbon and environmental goods and services," the study said.

"China's transformation has profound implications for the global economy and greatly increases the prospects for keeping global GHG emissions within relatively safe limits," it said. But that depends largely on China's ability to reduce its emissions at a rapid rate after peaking and on the actions of other countries in the next two decades, the report said. The December UN climate summit in Paris will be more successful if governments everywhere understand the extent of change in China and its implications for global emissions.

China's clean industrial investment and innovation will boost global low-carbon technology markets, while at the same time adversely hitting exporters of coal and some other raw materials. "Eventually, this increasing momentum could unleash a large wave of clean energy investment, innovation and growth — a new energy-industrial revolution," Stern said.