【英文】世界经济论坛报告：中国的气候挑战：资助向零排放过渡（44页）

英文研究报告 2022年08月10日 08:53 管理员

China is active in the world’s major global initiatives to tackle climate change. Like most other countries, it recognizes that a global problem needs global solutions. It is moving ahead with the ongoing adoption of the Paris Accords, including those commitments agreed at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021. In addition, despite broader geopolitical tensions, China and the US issued a joint statement addressing the climate crisis, followed by a joint declaration on tackling climate change at COP26, which demonstrate a commitment to boosting climate cooperation over the next decade (Figure 1). Domestic policies in China are also heavily focused on climate change. The latest fve-year plan, covering 2021-25, puts decarbonization at the centre of policy-making, and the country has also made progress in the carbon trading market.

Nonetheless, it is also clear that China’s transition to a carbon-free future has only just started. Its commitment to reaching peak CO2 emissions by 2030 and having net-zero CO2 emissions by 2060 represents a gigantic project that is unique in two ways. First, industrial output constitutes a much higher proportion of the Chinese economy than any other major economy. And second, its economic governance model means that the West’s freemarket mechanisms might be less applicable to driving change. China is considered to be “the world’s factory”, with its manufacturing’s share of GDP – 27% in 2019 – far higher than in any of the developed economies such as Germany and Japan (Figure 2).1 Furthermore, this manufacturing is heavily concentrated in sectors with high CO2 emissions (Figure 3), including steel, cement, petrochemicals and automotive.2 China’s manufacturing CO2 emissions alone are equal to 2.2 times the total emissions in Europe and almost 13 times the carbon sunk from photosynthesis in the Amazon jungle.3 This carbon-heavy core of the Chinese economy will require substantial technological advances and investment to reach net zero.