Category: China News Brief and Action Alert

China—No 100% 2050 Commitment Benchmark: 29% of electricity from renewables by 2030 China has not made a commitment to reach 100% renewable energy by 2050; however, its renewable energy target is to produce 20% of its electricity from clean sources by 2030. China has planned to invest 2.5 trillion Yuan (292 billion pounds) into renewable...

China—National Cap and Trade Program President Xi Jinping announced last week that China will push ahead with an ambitious plan to build the world’s largest market for carbon emission permits. This national cap-and-trade program will expand from the seven regional pilot emissions trading systems established in the country’s 12th Five Year Plan (in 2011). The...

China—Moving Forward Ecofys Consultancy, an energy and climate consulting group, has determined China to be in good stead to achieve, and even surpass, its pledge for the Paris Climate Agreement. Earlier this year, China demonstrated positive developments in coal use as it canceled the construction of over 100 coal power stations. This effort is recognized...

2015-2020 Action Plan for the Efficient Use of Coal and 2016-2020 13th Five-Year Plan In February 2015, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the Finance Ministry released the 2015 – 2020 action plan for the efficient use of coal: aiming to decrease coal use by 160 million tonnes in the determined period....

Typhoon Nepartak—A Category 5 Super Typhoon From mid-June through July of 2016, China endured a series of extreme precipitation events, including the tail-end of Typhoon Nepartak—a Category 5 super typhoon—that triggered deadly floods across twenty-six of the nation’s provinces. Official reports published on July 26, 2016 claim that the series of disasters led to a...

Historical Overview Chinese media coverage of global climate change has become increasingly prominent; its growth described in three distinct phases: before and after the release of the February 2007 IPCC report, and later in the discussion and analysis of the Paris Agreement (particularly focusing on China’s role in curbing emissions, and its relation to the...

Regions/Provinces/States Hebei Province Clean Heating Project—In 2003, district heating represented about 5.3 to 6.1 of total coal consumption in China and in 2008, the heating sector consumed a total of 145.4 million tons of raw coal. With continued urbanization and rising levels of quality of life in China, the effort to minimize the carbon intensity...

Government Official Dr. Chen Jining Minister of Environmental Protection, People’s Republic of China Dr. Chen was appointed Minister of Environmental Protection in January 2015 and has since heavily focused on reducing air pollution in China’s major cities. He focuses on applying an environmental system analysis and integrated assessment for environmental engineering and policies. Contact information...

Research Study: “The Impacts of Climate Change on Water Resources and Agriculture in China,” Piao et.al., Nature Magazine , 2010 Piao et al.’s 2010 paper, ‘Impacts of Climate Change on Water Resources and Agriculture in China’, published in Nature Magazine, qualifies as the most important research conducted in the past five years in China due...

China: The 13th Five Year Plan (2016-2020) China’s climate policies are defined by the central government, the most important of which are set in the Five Year Plans, a national economic statement that outlines the country’s growth path through wide-ranging targets. The 13th Five Year Plan (2016 – 2020) presents six targets relevant to emission...