On Friday, China released a draft summary of its 14th Five-Year Plan, the most important document that not only guides the country’s economic development, but also has huge consequences for global carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.
The new plan’s emissions targets for 2025 reflect a continuing contradiction between China’s short- and long-term climate targets.
In the long run, China has expressed a strong commitment to climate action. President Xi Jinping surprised the world last September when he announced that China would aim to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Climate scientists have asked countries to reach that goal by 2050, but it was still a significant step for China – the first time that the country has made any formal commitment to zero its emissions.
And yet, even when Xi made that announcement, CO2 emissions in China were skyrocketing. Like the rest of the world, the pandemic had caused a sudden drop in China’s economic activity in early 2020. But, after quickly controlling the pandemic within its borders, the Chinese government channeled stimulus dollars in the highly polluting construction and manufacturing sectors, fueling steel and cement production. As a result, China’s emissions increased by an estimated 1.5 percent in 2020, even counting the initial drop.
“China’s economic recovery from the pandemic so far has been anything but green,” Li Shuo, a senior global policy advisor for Greenpeace East Asia, he said during a press conference on Monday.
Now, with the launch of the goals of the 14th Five-Year Plan, the Chinese government signals that the growth of the country’s emissions should slow down somewhat in relation to the last few months, but continue at least for the next five years, according to analysts.
On the one hand, the growing emphasis on green development in China’s plans, rather than the historic focus on GDP, shows that the Communist Party sees a strong national interest in reducing emissions over time. However, these latest climate goals do not reach the level that the global scientific consensus requires.
Let’s look at where China must be in 2025 to be in line with the goals of the Paris agreement – and the reasons why it is still dragging on climate action.
The deficiency in the climatic ambition of the 14th Five-Year Plan
The 14th Five-Year Plan contains a series of important climate goals that will guide the country in the years to come. Together, these goals suggest that China will continue to pursue climate action, but they do not represent a new era of high aspirations.
“As the first five-year plan after China pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, the 14th FYP should demonstrate strong climate ambition. However, the draft plan presented today does not seem to meet expectations, ”said Zhang Shuwei, chief economist at Draworld Environment Research Center, a Beijing-based consultancy. “The international community expected China’s climate policy to ‘jump out’, but in reality it is still ‘in its infancy’.”
Prominent climate advocates in China hoped the plan could clarify when exactly China plans to peak its carbon emissions, and at what level, by setting a “carbon cap”. Instead, the plan uses a more complicated metric included in previous plans – the reduction in “carbon intensity”, which is the carbon emissions per unit of GDP. This target was set at 18%, the same as in the previous five-year plan.
Normally, the government also sets an annual GDP growth target for the five-year period, which can be used to calculate absolute emissions growth. But this year, probably due to ongoing uncertainties related to the global economic recovery from the pandemic, China has set only a one-year target for GDP to grow by more than 6%.
Combined, these two targets suggest that China’s emissions will continue to increase next year, by at least 1.9 percent. If GDP grows at least 3.9 percent a year for the next four years, China’s emissions may continue to increase at a slow pace, while still meeting the new carbon intensity reduction target, Zhang calculated.
At worst, if China continues its energy-intensive recovery from the pandemic and GDP growth skyrockets for several years, emissions growth may even accelerate after decelerating in the previous five years, according to chief analyst Lauri Myllyvirta from the Energy and Clean Air Research Center (CREA), an international environmental think tank. (From China carbon emissions have increased by about 1.7 percent a year for the past five years.)
He also noted that one of China’s other important climate targets, a limit on overall energy consumption, was not included in this most recent plan, removing a barrier to growth in emissions.
What does this mean for global climate goals? According to a joint study published by the Asia Society Policy Institute and Climate Analytics in November, China needs to peak its emissions as soon as possible, and certainly by 2025, to be in line with the Paris agreement. Currently, China has only pledged to peak its emissions before 2030.
The other main climate target in the 14th Five-Year Plan is a little more promising. China has set a slightly bolder target for renewable energy: 20 percent of its energy is expected to come from non-fossil sources by 2025. This is a slight acceleration from the accumulation of non-fossil energy in the last period of the five-year plan, during which the Rosa portion of 12.3 to 15.9 percent.
However, again, it does not fully align with China’s long-term climate goals and the Paris agreement. According to CREA analysis, China needs to obtain 25% of its energy from non-fossil sources by 2025 to be on track to meet its 2060 target.
Overall, therefore, these targets suggest modest progress for the world’s largest issuer in the years to come. It is important to note, however, that, historically, the environmental targets in the five-year plans have been set to be exceeded. All of the climatic goals of the 13th Five-Year Plan have been exceeded.
“Considering China’s habit of compromising and over-delivering five-year plans, these targets will protect against an increase in emissions growth,” said Li, of Greenpeace East Asia. “But to tackle the climate crisis, China needs to reduce emissions growth to a much slower level and flatten the emissions curve at the beginning of the next five-year period.”
China will face further testing of its climate ambition this year
Although the 14th Five-Year Plan is an important indicator of China’s commitment to combating climate change in the short term, the country’s intentions will be clarified in the coming months.
As is typical, by the end of the year, China will also launch specific five-year plans for energy and electricity – and, for the first time, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment will publish a five-year climate plan and a peak emissions plan. These plans will provide more granular details on some of the main outstanding issues that will dictate China’s emissions.
The biggest question remains whether China will reverse its coal consumption, which increased slightly last year, even during the pandemic. Environmentalists became increasingly concerned as China built 38.4 gigawatts of coal-fired power plant capacity in 2020 alone – three-quarters of the new coal-fired construction worldwide.
What happens internationally can also play a role in defining China’s emissions. The Biden government has pledged to reaffirm the United States’ global leadership in climate change and is planning to host a global climate summit on Earth Day in April. In preparation, the government said it will launch a new and more ambitious 2030 target for the United States.
This could potentially free China up to increase its 2030 targets as well. In December, President Xi announced new targets, which experts said were not strong enough. However, they have not yet been formalized under the Paris agreement, so there is still room for China to make its goals more aggressive by the deadline: the next big round of UN climate negotiations, to be held in November in Glasgow, Scotland .
But with ongoing tensions in US-China relations, analysts are unsure whether the two countries will be able to cooperate on climate change.
For the time being, the 14th Five-Year Plan has shown that China is not yet ready to focus much more on climate change in the short term.
“It opened up a battle between these two sides of the corridor,” said Li, pointing to the divide between proponents of continued industrial growth and those fighting for the progress of the climate in China. “In a way, instead of answering the main questions related to the climate, this morning it raised more questions.”