Assessing China’s prospects for carbon neutrality
Dec 15,2020 - Last updated at Dec 15,2020
By Xu Han, Sebastian Lewis and Shaun Roache
NEW YORK — At the United Nations General Assembly this September, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Given that China has been the planet’s single-largest source of global carbon dioxide emissions in recent years, accounting for about 30 per cent, decarbonisation there could contribute substantially to the global effort to mitigate climate change.
China, of course, will have to rebalance its economy. Among other things, that means shifting from manufacturing to services, from capital-intensive to innovation-led activity, from exports to domestic demand and from investment to consumption. All of these changes are mutually reinforcing, such that delivering on one facilitates progress on the others.