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Climate change: World should focus on delivering commitments instead of setting new goals, China’s top envoy says

  • Now is the time for action and implementation of our commitments, Xie Zhenhua, China’s climate change envoy, says
  • Former US special envoy for climate change Todd Stern tells panel consensus was forming that the world needed to upgrade climate change goal to 1.5 degrees

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Developed economies should shoulder their fair share of responsibilities by achieving net zero emissions earlier than developing countries, Xie says. Photo: AFP
Eric NgandYujie Xue
The world should focus on delivering decarbonisation promises and engage in international technological cooperation, rather than arguing over agreed upon goals, according to Xie Zhenhua, China’s climate change envoy.
Xie, the country’s top climate diplomat, told a webinar on Tuesday that it was more important for countries to pool resources to innovate and share technology to reduce the cost of low carbon energy solutions, than to wrangle over whether to upgrade global goals to keep global warming at 1.5 degrees instead of 2 degrees.

“Now is the time for action and implementation of our commitments, not the time to argue whether it should be 1.5 or 2 degrees,” he told the panel discussion organised by Our Hong Kong Foundation and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Xie’s comments were made in response to Todd Stern, the former US special envoy for climate change under the Obama administration, who told the webinar that a consensus was forming among international scientists that the world needed to upgrade the goal to 1.5 degrees. He said this was needed because the world had already seen more heatwaves, wildfires and floods of unprecedented severity in recent years with global warming of 1.2 degrees. Stern added that a 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report suggested that the consequences of a two degree warming will be “far worse” than that of 1.5 degrees.

The US and China have committed to cooperating with each other and other nations to tackle the climate crisis, including cooperating in multilateral processes such as the Paris Agreement, Xie said. Given countries were at different stages of economic development and had varied energy resources, developed economies should shoulder their fair share of responsibilities given their longer history of industrialisation by achieving net zero emissions earlier than developing countries, and help the later do so as well, he said.

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US, China put aside differences for pledge to work together on climate change

US, China put aside differences for pledge to work together on climate change

“Different countries have different starting points, and their time to achieve near-zero emissions should also be different,” Xie said. “If the world will achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, developed countries should do so by around 2040, achieve negative emissions by 2050, and provide technology and financial support to developing countries.”

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