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China Briefing handpicks and explains the most important climate and energy stories from China over the past fortnight.
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Key developments
Voices from China
‘TRUE MULTILATERILIAM’: Although not attending COP29 in person, Chinese president Xi Jinping issued a call for the global south to “work together to practise true multilateralism, and to advocate for an equal and orderly multipolar world and universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalisation”, state-run newspaper China Daily reported.
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CLIMATE FINANCE: Ding Xuexiang, Xi’s “special representative” at COP and China’s executive vice-premier, notably used the UN language of climate finance to describe Chinese overseas aid for the first time (see below). Speaking at a “high level segment” on Tuesday, Ding added that the “complete transformation of growth models is the fundamental solution to climate change”. He also called for “strengthening early-warning systems for all and enhancing climate adaptation capacity” – a ”specific requirement” from Xi, according to state news agency Xinhua.
‘ENHANCED’ ACTION: At a methane summit co-hosted by China and the US, and attended by Carbon Brief, climate envoy Liu Zhenmin said that “co-operation on global climate action will continue to be enhanced.” (See below.) Speaking at China’s large and very busy “pavilion”, Liu said climate change is a global challenge and China, in particular, has experienced more severe extreme weather events recently. He touted investments worth $676bn in energy transformation and said China’s export of wind and solar products had helped the world cut emissions by 810m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
‘PUSHING FORWARD’: Speaking at a separate China pavilion event, Zhao Yingmin, vice minister of China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE), said that “addressing climate change is a global consensus” and that China is taking the responsibility of “pushing forward green and low-carbon development”. He also emphasised the role of women and young people in tackling climate change, saying “we need to mobilise all forces”.
‘CRITICAL POINT’: Xia Yingxian, director of the climate department of the MEE, commented at a press conference ahead of COP29 that this year is a “critical point for climate-finance negotiations” and that developed countries must “fulfil their commitment”, according to business news outlet 21st Century Business Herald. Back at the COP29 China pavilion, Carbon Brief heard an official speaking on behalf of Xia again supporting multilateral cooperation and saying China had an “unswerving” commitment to climate action. He added that an energy transition covering “all aspects” of society is needed. The official representing Xia closed his remarks in English, saying: “China is very willing to cooperate…to promote a low-carbon and sustainable future.”
STEPPING UP: Wen Hua, deputy director-general of the Department of Resources Conservation and Environmental Protection of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top planner, told the methane event that “China is willing to take a more active role in global climate governance”.
Agenda fight
TRADE CONCERNS: China, on behalf of the BASIC group (Brazil, China, India and South Africa), “submitted a proposal” ahead of COP29 to include “concerns with climate-change related unilateral restrictive trade measures” in the conference’s agenda, Reuters reported. According to the full text of the request, BASIC argued that “unilateral trade-restrictive measures adopted by developed country parties under the guise of climate objectives [have] disproportionate adverse effects on developing country parties”. The text added that parties must “send a clear and strong signal of commitment to multilateralism and global cooperation”.
HORSE-TRADING: The request was largely interpreted as pushback to the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which China has “strongly criticised” in the past. Climate Home News noted that “BASIC countries have long opposed” the CBAM and “made a similar agenda proposal” for COP28. The BASIC request – ultimately shunted into unofficial “presidential consultations” – was at the heart of an “agenda fight” that dominated the first day in Baku. The fight also encompassed a broader, ongoing argument over how to take forward the COP28 pledge on “transitioning away from fossil fuels”, with the LMDC group, including China, opposing this being part of the so-called UAE dialogue.
Climate finance
‘HUGE DIVISIONS’: China entered the “finance COP” under pressure to play an upgraded role in climate finance, as “huge divisions” emerged over how much money should be paid into the “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) and by whom, the Financial Times reported. Beijing has “firmly rejected” these calls, according to Agence France-Presse, which quoted a Chinese official “warning on Sunday during a closed-door session that the talks should not aim to ‘renegotiate’ existing agreements”. The state-run broadcaster China Global Television Network (CGTN) quoted envoy Liu calling on “developed countries to take the lead in providing financial assistance to developing nations”.
$1.3 TRILLION: Early on in negotiations, the G77+China negotiating bloc also rejected the proposed text for a NCQG framework, the New Indian Express reported, adding that they called for $1.3tn per year to be provided by developed countries and for “a fresh, equitable text…prioritis[ing] the needs of developing countries and uphold[ing] the principles of equity and ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’”.
OLIVE BRANCH: In his COP29 speech, vice premier Ding offered an olive branch by telling delegates that China has already “provided and mobilised project funds of more than 177bn yuan ($24.5bn) for developing countries’ climate response”. This is the first time China has used the language of climate finance, Kate Logan, director at the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI), wrote on Twitter. She added that this “plac[ed China’s contributions] on the same order – if not higher than – many developed countries’ efforts” and gave China “teeth in pushing developed countries to do more”.
SOLUTION PROVIDER: Speaking to Carbon Brief in May, Li Shuo, director at ASPI’s China climate hub, said that one possible solution, in his view, was to leverage China’s position as “the biggest solution provider” for low-carbon technologies to encourage it to “provide finance or facilitate investment” in developing countries’ energy transitions, allowing China to find a palatable role for itself in an outer layer of a potential “onion” structure for the NCQG.
US-China climate cooperation
LOOMING SHADOW: China and the US entered COP29 after a series of meetings between climate envoys John Podesta and Liu Zhenmin, but without an equivalent to last year’s Sunnylands statement – a document that “signalled Biden and Xi’s shared intent to address the climate crisis”, according to thinktank the Lowy Institute. Liu told reporters that China is “concerned” about US climate policy under a second Trump administration, although he emphasised that “international multilateral climate cooperation should continue”. Meanwhile, Podesta said in a press conference attended by Carbon Brief that China has an “obligation…to come forward with a 1.5C-aligned, all-greenhouse-gas, economy-wide [NDC climate pledge]”, adding that, on the climate-finance question, expanding the donor base is “long warranted” and that “large emitters must be accountable”. (Ding confirmed in his COP29 address that China’s climate pledge would be economy-wide and cover all greenhouse gases.) However, the New York Times noted that it may be difficult at COP29 to replicate the “key roles” US negotiators have played in “persuading countries like China…to commit to tougher emissions targets”.
CHINA LEADS: As the world awaits a US retreat from the global climate stage, China “appears more committed to the [Paris] agreement than ever”, the Wall Street Journal reported, quoting former climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing saying: “Everyone looks to China now…I think with the US out, China will step up, but in a very different way.” In a press conference watched by Carbon Brief, Yuan Ying, chief China representative at Greenpeace, echoed this message, saying that the US election results should not cause China to “lower their ambition level” and that it should instead fill the “climate leadership vacuum”. ASPI’s Li, speaking at a Carbon Brief event ahead of COP29, said that it is crucial for China to note that its actions in negotiations will send a “strong signal” to the rest of the world on the “future of global climate governance”, adding that “China has invested a lot” in its image as a climate leader.
BRIGHT SPOT: Methane remains one area where US-China cooperation has traction. While China did not make any new announcements at the COP29 summit on methane and non-CO2 greenhouse gases, attended by Carbon Brief, Liu did use the platform to state that “China-US co-operation on enhancing climate action had been effective over the past year”, adding that he “hope[d]” that US-China climate cooperation “will continue to be enhanced”. Ryna Cui, associate research professor and acting director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland, told Carbon Brief that both countries underscored their “strong interest to continue [cooperation], especially on issues like methane” at the summit , adding that “strong” channels at the subnational and non-government levels “will become increasingly critical to make engagement [in methane and other areas] more robust” in the years ahead.
Emphasising energy transition
TRANSITION PATHWAYS: “Energy transition” has been emphasised by multiple high-level Chinese officials at this year’s COP. At the China pavilion, the Energy Research Institute of the Academy of Macroeconomic Research (ERI), a research thinktank under the supervision of the NDRC, launched its 2024 China energy transition report – a key document illustrating China’s potential energy transition pathways. Lyu Wenbin, head of the institute, told Carbon Brief: “The Chinese government has proposed the ‘dual-carbon’ goal and energy transition is an important part of it. With the goal being clearly set, what we can do for delivering it is to choose the best pathway.” Bai Quan, director of the energy study centre, told Carbon Brief that the biggest difference between the 2023 and 2024 report was the “emphasis on global cooperation”. He said: “Our report has absorbed [energy transition] experiences from different places…We would love to discuss more new ideas with everyone else in the world.”
COAL CRITICISM: The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) executive director Fatih Birol said at the launch of the report that there are few countries that are prepared for the new era of electricity and that China is the “leading one”. However, he cautioned that China “needs to pay attention to its coal-fired power plants sooner than later”, adding that “renewable energy with batteries will be a better solution for China’s energy demands than coal”.
Captured
China sent a delegation of 969 people to COP29, according to new analysis by Carbon Brief, as the country seeks to boost its influence in climate diplomacy. The numbers are lower than they were for COP28, when the China delegation included 1,296 people. Nevertheless, the size of the official “party” delegation, at 190, is double the average party delegation China sent from COP20 to COP27. A further 779 members of the Chinese delegation went to Baku as “overflow” participants.
Watch, read, listen
CHINESE LENDING: A new report by ODI explored recent “diversification of Chinese lending” to infrastructure projects, including energy infrastructure, in African countries.
NCQG: A new article by the Asia Society Policy Institute assessed how China could be incentivised to contribute more to the new COP29 finance goal.
EXPERT VIEWS: Greenovation Hub published a readout from a closed-door session, in which they hosted a number of China’s climate experts to “discuss the mobilisation of climate finance and the strengthening of climate goal setting” ahead of COP29.
NEW ERA: The European Council on Foreign Relations described how the EU could use its “diplomatic and regulatory toolbox” to encourage China to set ambitious climate targets in the absence of “crucial” US climate diplomacy.
$24.5 billion
The amount of money (alternatively, 177bn yuan) China has “provided and mobilised” for “other developing countries” to address climate change since 2016, according to Chinese executive vice-premier and politburo standing committee member Ding Xuexiang in his COP29 address, using UN-speak for climate finance “provided and mobilised” for the first time. It is not clear how this figure, which is lower than other recent estimates of China’s climate finance provision, was calculated.
New science
The 2024 China report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: launching a new low-carbon, healthy journey
The Lancet Public Health
A new report found that “China is faced with an increase in health threats from hot and dry weather conditions, such as heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires”, with the country seeing an average of 16 heatwave exposure days per person in 2023, which “resulted in a 1.9 times surge in heatwave-related deaths”. This is the Lancet’s fifth annual China report. Zhang Shihui, co-first author of the research, told Carbon Brief at COP29 that they noticed China’s action on talking climate-related health problems has become more systematic, but there is still an “urgent need to increase funding, actively promote synergistic governance for pollution reduction and carbon emission abatement, strengthen interdepartmental collaboration, and enhance refined health meteorological services”.
A new study found that the greenhouse gas emissions intensity (GEI) – defined as GHG emissions per unit planting size – in crop production in rural China is falling, but that the inequality in GEI is increasing. The authors used survey data taken from more than 430,000 farming households over 1993-2020 to explore the driving forces of GEI in crop production. They found that overall GEI increased until 2015 and then began dropping, but that inequality in GEI continued to increase 13%.
Fewer than 15% of coal power plant workers in China can easily shift to green jobs by 2060
One Earth
Fewer than 15% of coal power plant workers in China will be able to easily access “green jobs” by 2060, according to new research. The study found that difficulties stand in the way of this transition, such as workers travelling long distances to access “green” job opportunities. The transition rate could be even lower in provinces dominated by coal power, the research found, with just 2% of workers making the move in Shandong province, for example.
China Briefing is compiled by Wanyuan Song and Anika Patel. It is edited by Wanyuan Song and Dr Simon Evans. Please send tips and feedback to china@carbonbrief.org
The post China Briefing 14 November 2024: COP29 special edition appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
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