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China's national flag is seen in front of a chimney of a cogeneration plant in Beijing, China. Photo: Reuters

A climate for change: how China went from zero to hero in fight against global warming in just 6 years

Beijing has gone from thwarting deals to encouraging them – while blurring the lines between developed and developing nations

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When the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit ended without reaching a legally binding deal to limit greenhouse gas emissions, China was demonised for wrecking the negotiations.

Six years later, the world’s largest carbon emitter has become an unlikely leader in the international dialogue.

China is now praised for its plans to tackle climate change – by peaking its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, reducing its dependence on fossil fuels, and helping poor countries adapt to global warming.

The changes, made possible by economic restructuring and public pressure to tackle pollution, come as the country – now the world’s second-largest economy – straddles the division between developing and developed nations.

The distinction was enshrined at the 1992 UN climate change convention under the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”. As a developing country, China was not required to make carbon emission cuts under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol – the international treaty that has been extended until 2020 and that commits only industrialised nations to mandatory targets.

As a developing country, China was entitled to grow its economy with unchecked carbon emissions until 2020 – giving it what Chinese officials privately called a “golden opportunity”.

So when negotiators from more than 190 nations met in Copenhagen in 2009, China refused not only to take on cuts itself, but ruled out including concrete emission targets in the summit’s agreement. Beijing was criticised because then, China was already the world’s largest carbon emitter and third-largest economy.

READ MORE: China’s climate change promise opens the way for global deal

Qin Gang, a foreign ministry spokesman, defended China’s stance later that year.

“As a developing country, China firmly upheld the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, steadfastly defended the development rights and interests of the vast number of developing countries and unswervingly safeguarded their unity and coordination.”

For years after Copenhagen, those “development rights” remained a high priority for China.

During the final hours of the Durban climate summit in 2011, China’s top negotiator Xie Zhenhua ingratiated himself to the Chinese public by rejecting developed nations’ demands for developing countries to do more.

“What qualifies you to lecture us on what to do?” he was filmed as saying, raising his voice and waving his hands. The footage, broadcast on CCTV, won him huge popularity at home.

But since then, the tone has quietly changed.

Smoke billows from chimneys in Heihe, in Heilongjiang province. China’s emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change will be at the centre of talks in Paris. Photo: AFP

Chinese negotiators still talk about “common but differentiated responsibilities”, but have also called for countries to offer innovative interpretations of the issue at next week’s Paris summit, when nearly 200 countries will negotiate a new deal for the post-2020 period to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius.

Xie, who is now China’s special representative for climate change, said in Beijing last week: “The [expected] Paris agreement should represent this distinction [between developed and developing countries], but we also need innovation.”

Until President Xi Jinping announced the plan to peak emissions by 2030 in a joint statement with US President Barack Obama, China’s targets were only in terms of carbon intensity – emissions per unit of gross domestic product growth. In Copenhagen, China pledged to cut emissions by 40 to 45 per cent per unit of GDP.

China’s attitudes towards financing and transparency issues have also shifted along the way
Li Shuo, Greenpeace East Asia

“China’s attitudes towards financing and transparency issues have also shifted along the way,” said Li Shuo, a senior climate policy analyst at Greenpeace East Asia. “It’s no longer the we cannot walk away from the [developed versus developing] mindset. Instead, China is already making as many compromises on these issues as it can.”

In Copenhagen, China had refused to accept the same level of scrutiny of its emission reductions as developed countries, but Xi agreed with Obama in September on “strengthened” transparency that allowed some flexibility for poorer countries.

China’s promise of US$3.1 billion in support to developing countries, announced when Xi met Obama at the White House, also represented “a transition in the country’s diplomatic strategy”, said Professor Zhang Haibin at Peking University’s School of International Studies.

Workers sort coal on a conveyer belt near a coal mine in Datong, in Shanxi province. Coal accounts for nearly 80 per cent of China’s carbon emissions. Photo: AFP

he amount is similar to what the United States promised for the Green Climate Fund, a multilateral financing scheme under the UN climate convention.

While the rhetoric of “development rights” has faded from official statements, China has become more interested in establishing itself as a “responsible major power” since Xi took office in 2013.

Hu Min, programme director of the low-carbon development programme at Energy Foundation China, said the changes had been shaped by domestic economic restructuring as well as China’s increasingly sound climate policy.

“China no longer sees low-carbon growth as a threat to its economic development. Rather, it’s seen as bringing new business opportunities,” Hu said.

China no longer sees low-carbon growth as a threat to its economic development. Rather, it’s seen as bringing new business opportunities
Hu Min, Energy Foundation China

The changes have also been made possible by an unexpected drop in China’s coal consumption – a trend that began last year amid the economic slowdown, rising use of renewable energy as well as falling production of energy-intensive products such as steel.

Governments have also come under huge public pressure to tackle air pollution in cities and to replace coal with cleaner natural gas in urban areas.

As a result, the National Coal Association said this month China’s coal consumption fell 4.7 per cent year-on-year in the first 10 months this year. In 2014, coal use dropped 2.9 per cent.

READ MORE: WHO warns China that climate change could undo decades of advances in health

Just a few years ago, many researchers expected China’s coal consumption to peak no sooner than 2020.

But it might be too early to call this the end of China’s coal era – or to celebrate the country’s role as a “leader” in the international climate negotiations.

One worrying sign is that China has given the green light to the construction of 155 coal-fired power plants this year, after central authorities delegated the right of approval to local governments, according to Greenpeace.

The 470 billion yuan (HK$570 billion) capital cost of the projects meant local governments would cling to investment-driven growth, even though central leaders were calling for economic restructuring and a focus on boosting consumption, said Greenpeace’s Lauri Myllyvirta.

Coal accounts for nearly 80 per cent of China’s carbon emissions, prompting some environmental groups and think tanks to call for the country to cap its coal consumption between 2016 and 2020. Yet such a target is missing from the Communist Party’s latest five-year development plan, approved earlier this month, raising questions over the future of coal use in China.

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