China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fell by 3% in March 2024, ending a 14-month surge that began when the economy reopened after the nation’s “zero-Covid” controls were lifted in December 2022.
The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures and commercial data, reinforces the view that China’s emissions could have peaked in 2023.
The drivers of the CO2 drop in March 2024 were expanding solar and wind generation, which covered 90% of the growth in electricity demand, as well as declining construction activity.
Oil demand growth also ground to a halt, indicating that the post-Covid rebound may have run its course.
A 2023 peak in China’s CO2 emissions is possible if the buildout of clean energy sources is kept at the record levels seen last year.
However, there are divergent views across the industry and government on the outlook for clean energy growth. How this gap gets resolved is the key determinant of when China’s emissions will peak – if they have not done so already.
Other key findings from the analysis include:
- Wind and solar growth pushed fossil fuels’ share of electricity generation in China down to 63.6% in March 2024, from 67.4% a year earlier, despite strong growth in demand.
- The ongoing contraction of real-estate construction activity in China saw steel production fall by 8% and cement output by 22% in March 2024.
- Electric vehicles (EVs) now make up around one-in-10 vehicles on China’s roads, knocking around 3.5 percentage points off the growth in petrol demand.
- Some 45% of last year’s record solar additions were smaller-scale “distributed” systems, creating an illusory “missing data problem”.
Why did emissions fall in March?
Looking at the first quarter of 2024 as a whole, China’s CO2 emissions increased significantly, based on preliminary data on energy consumption from the National Bureau of Statistics.
January and February of this year still saw large increases from the low base of 2023, when the economy was still subdued by the recent ending of zero-Covid restrictions.
As a result, CO2 emissions during the quarter increased by 3.8% year-on-year, with coal consumption growing 3%, oil 4% and gas 11% compared with the same period in 2023.
The turnaround happened in March, when CO2 emissions fell by 2%, due to a 1% fall in coal use, flat oil demand and a 22% drop in cement production. The reduction in CO2 emissions came despite a 14% rise in gas consumption, as the fuel is a minor part of China’s mix.
As seen in the figure below, China’s CO2 emissions had started increasing in February 2023, after Covid-19 controls were lifted in December 2022.
The year-on-year comparison to January-February 2023 is, therefore, still affected by the low base caused by the last year of zero-Covid, making March the first month to give a clear indication of the emissions trends after the rebound.
The main driver of China’s emissions growth in recent years has been the power sector (see below).
Conversely, the main reason the emissions trend turned into a reduction in March was that power-sector emissions growth slowed down sharply. Emissions from the sector only increased by 1% year-on-year, due to strong growth in solar and wind power generation.
While power-sector emissions stabilised, the largest source of reductions in emissions in March was the continued decline in demand for steel and cement from the construction sector, as illustrated in the figure below.
Steel production fell by 8% and, as a result, there was also a fall in production of the main fuel used by steel mills – coking coal. Cement production fell dramatically, by 22% year-on-year.
These trends seem set to continue, as real-estate investment continued to contract – for the third year – as a result of a government clampdown on excess leverage and financial risk in the sector, and sizable supply resulting from booming construction in the past.
The contraction in construction volumes has not resulted in as large a drop in China’s demand for steel and other energy-intensive metals as might be expected.
The reason is rapid growth and investment in manufacturing, which uses metals for the construction of facilities and the production of industrial machinery.
It is unlikely that this manufacturing growth can continue, as global markets for different goods and commodities become saturated. The government’s economic policy now emphasises “new productive forces”, in the latest attempt to shift economic growth away from traditional heavy industry. The term refers to high-end manufacturing and R&D, which are, for the most part, less energy intensive than China’s traditional industrial sectors.
Looking at other sectors in March 2024, oil demand for transport was unchanged on a year earlier – following months of strong increases – suggesting that the post-Covid rebound could be petering out.
The production of jet fuel (+35%) and petrol (+7%) still increased, indicating growth in demand from passenger transport, but diesel production stagnated (+1%) and total crude oil refining volumes also only increased 1%.
The rise in the share of electric vehicles (EVs) is making a meaningful dent in oil demand, with the share of electric vehicles out of all vehicles on the road increasing to 10.5%, from 7.0% a year ago, as estimated on the basis of cumulative sales over the past 10 years. This indicates that EV adoption lowered petrol demand growth by 3.5 percentage points.
Gas demand rebounded sharply, increasing 14% year-on-year, after a drop caused by high gas prices. Growth in gas consumption came predominantly from industry and households.
Power-sector gas consumption increased 8%, as the utilisation of gas-fired power plants recovered, but this only contributed a small fraction of the overall growth.
The share of gas in China’s energy mix fell from 2021 to 2023, after more than two decades of continuous increases, and has only now started to resume growth.
One recent driver of emissions increases continued: coal consumption in the chemical industry increased 14%, extending the double-digit growth seen in 2022 and 2023.
While there is not yet enough data to estimate CO2 emissions in April, industrial data for the month indicates that the trends seen in March continued.
Thermal power output – mostly from coal – grew at a slow rate of 1.3%, with most demand growth being covered by solar. Steel, cement and coke output fell by 8%, 9% and 7%, respectively, reflecting continued decline in construction volumes. Oil refining volumes fell 3%.
Domestic coal mining output fell 3% while imports increased 11%, meaning total supply fell 5%.
Gas demand saw further strong growth, with imports increasing 15% and domestic production 3%. Among energy-intensive industries, the chemical and non-ferrous metal industries continued rapid output growth.
Solar and wind covering demand growth
The stabilising emissions in the power sector are notable because electricity demand growth continued at a high rate of 7.4% – and hydropower utilisation stayed below the long-term average, affected by a prolonged drought.
Electricity demand growth has been exceptionally fast during the past few years, driven predominantly by industrial power use. In March, industrial demand growth slowed down, but a rebound in the service sector sustained overall growth.
Half of demand growth came from industry, with non-ferrous metals, chemicals, machinery and electronics the largest growth areas. One third came from services, with wholesale and retail trading the largest growth driver, and one sixth from households.
Household power demand has also seen a surge in the past couple of years, driven by a wave of air conditioning unit purchases triggered by the historic heatwave in 2022, especially in lower-income households that lacked air conditioning before.
Despite rapid growth in electricity demand, the rate of growth for large-scale power generation slowed to 3%, due to rising distributed solar power generation.
(Distributed solar refers to smaller-scale installations, often on the rooftops of homes and businesses, in contrast to the large, centralised solar farms.)
Overall, the record addition of solar and wind capacity in 2023 enabled these sources to deliver 22% of power generation and almost 90% of year-on-year growth in March, as shown in the figure below. The share of non-fossil power generation rose to 36.2%, from 32.6% last year.
The growing contribution of distributed solar power to generation has been somewhat hidden by the way that China’s monthly electricity data is reported. The National Bureau of Statistics only reports monthly power generation from very large-scale solar and windfarms. It has also made systematic upward revisions of previous year’s data, suggesting it had not captured output from new firms entering the market in real time.
As 45% of last year’s record solar additions were distributed generation, the exclusion of small solar installations is affecting these numbers a lot more than it used to.
This has caused a lot of confusion in China and overseas, especially as the reported electricity consumption became much larger than generation – an apparent impossibility. Bloomberg even called this a “missing data problem”.
The widening gap between electricity consumption and large-scale power generation makes it clear, however, that distributed solar is increasingly contributing to meeting electricity demand.
Unlike the monthly figures, there is no “missing” data in China’s annual reporting, as the yearly statistics include all power plants regardless of size. In 2023, for example, the annual statistics reported twice as much solar and 10% more wind power generation than the monthly statistics.
Indeed, calculating generation from reported installed capacity and utilisation hours of the capacity on a monthly basis reproduces the annual numbers closely. This makes it clear that the expansion of small-scale solar is contributing substantially to meeting electricity demand, even if the statistics bureau’s monthly data does not cover the power generation.
Clean energy boom continues
The fall in emissions in March was enabled by last year’s massive solar and wind power additions, with almost 300 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity connected to the grid. This boom accelerated in the first three months of 2024, with a 40% increase compared with the year before.
Solar power installations stood at 46GW, up 36% on year, and wind power installations at 16GW, increasing 50% year-on-year.
The first months of the year tend to be slower in terms of installations – and there are also gaps in reporting that mean that quite a bit of new capacity is only reported at the end of the year.
The strong year-on-year growth indicates that concerns about grid access for new projects have not affected the pace of capacity additions yet. Even if growth rates are tempered for the rest of the year, the numbers to date indicate that last year’s record pace could be maintained in 2024.
Solar panel production grew another 20% in January-March from last year’s already significant numbers, signalling strong demand from China and overseas.
EV production grew 29% while total vehicle production resumed its fall, so the share of EVs continued its rapid climb, reaching 31% in the first quarter compared with 26% the year before.
As the economics of solar and wind projects are strong, the main constraint on capacity additions will be grid access. Numerous provincial grid operators already began to limit additions of new wind and solar last year, as they were concerned that they would not be able to fully integrate the additional generation.
This highlights the shortcomings in China’s grid operation, because such challenges are arising when the share of wind and solar power in China’s power generation is still modest, at 15%, compared with 27% in the EU and 40% in Germany, Spain and Greece.
Action is being taken. The NDRC has begun to relax requirements for the grid access of solar and wind generators. This will increase the uncertainty for investors in wind and solar projects, but makes it easier for grid operators to integrate more capacity and will, therefore, support growth in capacity and generation.
The NDRC also issued a policy on developing electricity storage, pledging that, by 2027, the power system would be able to integrate new solar and wind capacity while keeping the share of their output that is wasted due to grid issues to a low level.
While solar and wind are beginning to cover most or all of power demand growth, investment in coal power is continuing. Additions of thermal power capacity slowed down slightly year-on-year in the first quarter, but provinces’ “key project lists” for 2024 include over 200GW of thermal power projects, which are mainly coal-fired.
Future ambition a major question mark
The fall in China’s emissions in March could mark the turnaround after blistering growth since 2020. As explained in analysis for Carbon Brief published last autumn, the current growth rate of clean energy has the potential to peak the country’s emissions.
Whether the clean energy growth will continue is, therefore, the key question for the future path of China’s emissions. However, views about the pace of future wind and solar developments diverge widely.
The China Photovoltaic Industry Association (CPIA) forecasts average annual capacity additions of 225GW from 2024 to 2030 in its “conservative” scenario, a slight increase from the 217GW installed in 2023. Its “optimistic” scenario would see this accelerate to 280GW per year. Under the CPIA’s projections, China’s total installed solar capacity reaches 2200-2600GW in 2030, up from 660GW today.
According to the wind power industry, China needs to install more than 50GW of new wind power capacity annually from 2021-2025 and more than 60GW annually from 2026 onwards, in order to reach the 2060 carbon neutrality target. This is a fairly modest trajectory, since capacity additions in 2023 were already 76GW.
On the other hand, the head of the National Energy Administration (NEA) Zhang Jianhua wrote in a recent article that clean-energy capacity additions should be kept above 100GW per year, less than half of the level achieved in 2023, implying that he views the recent acceleration as an anomaly and not something to be maintained.
Similarly, the NEA’s 2024 workplan targets 170GW of non-fossil power capacity added, as implied by the targets for total generating capacity and the share of non-fossil energy capacity. (Despite the 160GW target in the 2023 workplan, additions reached nearly 300GW.)
These alternative visions of wind and solar expansion are shown in the figure below. The dark blue line shows Zhang’s expectation that annual capacity additions would return to levels seen during 2020-2022, while the light blue and red lines show the renewable industry forecasts of growth broadly being maintained at 2023 levels – or steadily increasing.
The difference between the CPIA and NEA levels of ambition amounts to 1,400-1,800GW of solar and wind power capacity by 2030. If the resulting clean power generation were to replace coal in 2030, the difference in CO2 emissions would amount to 10-15% of China’s current emissions. By 2035, with a continuing trend in wind and solar growth, the CO2 saving would reach 20-25% of current emissions.
In his article, Zhang points to a number of challenges that could justify the lower level of clean-energy capacity additions that he is proposing, including the lack of a robust pricing mechanism for electricity storage, the need for better coordination of policies on the energy transition, as well as managing the land and marine area requirements for large new energy projects.
Still, dialling back the additions of solar and wind, as well as the associated battery storage, would be a cold shower to China’s economy, as these clean energy sectors have become a key source of economic growth.
Moreover, massive recent investments in manufacturing capacity in these sectors will only be utilised and pay off with continued growth in the demand for clean energy equipment.
The lower level of ambition of the government is also reflected in official targets for this year. The environmental ministry recently set a target to reduce carbon intensity – the level of emissions per unit of GDP – by 3.9% in 2024.
This target, if met, is an increase over the past three years when carbon intensity improved by only 1.5% per year on average. Yet, given that the target for GDP growth is “around 5%”, the carbon intensity target allows emissions to increase by more than 1%.
After rapid emission increases in 2021 to 2023, China is already severely off track for its 2025 and 2030 carbon intensity targets – and the annual targets for 2024 fail to close this gap.
Instead, it is exactly the required annual average that would have been needed every year to meet the 14th five-year plan target of 18%. As such, it avoids the existing shortfall from getting wider, but does nothing to make up for slow progress to date. The NDRC set a less ambitious target of reducing “fossil energy intensity” by 2.5% in 2024, which allows emissions to increase by more than 2%.
Zhang Jianhua also argued that clean energy should cover 70% of energy consumption growth in 2026-30, a target that is consistent with a slowdown in clean energy additions.
This would mean that 30% of energy consumption growth would still be covered by increasing the use of fossil fuels – and, therefore, CO2 emissions would also continue to increase.
Continued emissions growth would imply a major risk of missing China’s 2030 carbon intensity commitment – which is part of its international climate pledge under the Paris Agreement – as there is no space for energy-sector CO2 emissions to increase from 2023 to 2030 under the commitment, assuming average GDP growth of 5% or less.
China’s pledge, therefore, depends on clean energy growth continuing to significantly exceed the central government’s targets – or those targets being ratcheted up.
About the data
Data for the analysis was compiled from the National Bureau of Statistics of China, National Energy Administration of China, China Electricity Council and China Customs official data releases, and from WIND Information, an industry data provider.
Power sector coal consumption was estimated based on power generation from coal and the average heat rate of coal-fired power plants during each month, to avoid the issue with official coal consumption numbers affecting recent data. Power generation from coal was calculated from total thermal power generation and the reported capacity and utilisation hours of power plants firing coal, gas and biomass, to obtain the fuel mix of thermal power generation.
When data was available from multiple sources, different sources were cross-referenced and official sources used when possible, adjusting total consumption to match the consumption growth and changes in the energy mix reported by the National Bureau of Statistics.
The data for the first quarter of 2024 was scaled to match the reported year-on-year growth rates for the whole quarter in preliminary official data from the National Bureau of Statistics. The conclusion that emissions fell in March holds both with and without this adjustment.
CO2 emissions estimates are based on National Bureau of Statistics default calorific values of fuels and emissions factors from China’s latest national greenhouse gas emissions inventory, for the year 2018. Cement CO2 emissions factor is based on annual estimates up to 2023.
For oil consumption, apparent consumption is calculated from refinery throughput, with net exports of oil products subtracted.
The post Analysis: Monthly drop hints that China’s CO2 emissions may have peaked in 2023 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Monthly drop hints that China’s CO2 emissions may have peaked in 2023
Climate Change
Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter.
Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
Food inflation on the rise
DELUGE STRIKES FOOD: Extreme rainfall and flooding across the Mediterranean and north Africa has “battered the winter growing regions that feed Europe…threatening food price rises”, reported the Financial Times. Western France has “endured more than 36 days of continuous rain”, while farmers’ associations in Spain’s Andalusia estimate that “20% of all production has been lost”, it added. Policy expert David Barmes told the paper that the “latest storms were part of a wider pattern of climate shocks feeding into food price inflation”.
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NO BEEF: The UK’s beef farmers, meanwhile, “face a double blow” from climate change as “relentless rain forces them to keep cows indoors”, while last summer’s drought hit hay supplies, said another Financial Times article. At the same time, indoor growers in south England described a 60% increase in electricity standing charges as a “ticking timebomb” that could “force them to raise their prices or stop production, which will further fuel food price inflation”, wrote the Guardian.
‘TINDERBOX’ AND TARIFFS: A study, covered by the Guardian, warned that major extreme weather and other “shocks” could “spark social unrest and even food riots in the UK”. Experts cited “chronic” vulnerabilities, including climate change, low incomes, poor farming policy and “fragile” supply chains that have made the UK’s food system a “tinderbox”. A New York Times explainer noted that while trade could once guard against food supply shocks, barriers such as tariffs and export controls – which are being “increasingly” used by politicians – “can shut off that safety valve”.
El Niño looms
NEW ENSO INDEX: Researchers have developed a new index for calculating El Niño, the large-scale climate pattern that influences global weather and causes “billions in damages by bringing floods to some regions and drought to others”, reported CNN. It added that climate change is making it more difficult for scientists to observe El Niño patterns by warming up the entire ocean. The outlet said that with the new metric, “scientists can now see it earlier and our long-range weather forecasts will be improved for it.”
WARMING WARNING: Meanwhile, the US Climate Prediction Center announced that there is a 60% chance of the current La Niña conditions shifting towards a neutral state over the next few months, with an El Niño likely to follow in late spring, according to Reuters. The Vibes, a Malaysian news outlet, quoted a climate scientist saying: “If the El Niño does materialise, it could possibly push 2026 or 2027 as the warmest year on record, replacing 2024.”
CROP IMPACTS: Reuters noted that neutral conditions lead to “more stable weather and potentially better crop yields”. However, the newswire added, an El Niño state would mean “worsening drought conditions and issues for the next growing season” to Australia. El Niño also “typically brings a poor south-west monsoon to India, including droughts”, reported the Hindu’s Business Line. A 2024 guest post for Carbon Brief explained that El Niño is linked to crop failure in south-eastern Africa and south-east Asia.
News and views
- DAM-AG-ES: Several South Korean farmers filed a lawsuit against the country’s state-owned utility company, “seek[ing] financial compensation for climate-related agricultural damages”, reported United Press International. Meanwhile, a national climate change assessment for the Philippines found that the country “lost up to $219bn in agricultural damages from typhoons, floods and droughts” over 2000-10, according to Eco-Business.
- SCORCHED GRASS: South Africa’s Western Cape province is experiencing “one of the worst droughts in living memory”, which is “scorching grass and killing livestock”, said Reuters. The newswire wrote: “In 2015, a drought almost dried up the taps in the city; farmers say this one has been even more brutal than a decade ago.”
- NOUVELLE VEG: New guidelines published under France’s national food, nutrition and climate strategy “urged” citizens to “limit” their meat consumption, reported Euronews. The delayed strategy comes a month after the US government “upended decades of recommendations by touting consumption of red meat and full-fat dairy”, it noted.
- COURTING DISASTER: India’s top green court accepted the findings of a committee that “found no flaws” in greenlighting the Great Nicobar project that “will lead to the felling of a million trees” and translocating corals, reported Mongabay. The court found “no good ground to interfere”, despite “threats to a globally unique biodiversity hotspot” and Indigenous tribes at risk of displacement by the project, wrote Frontline.
- FISH FALLING: A new study found that fish biomass is “falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade”, noted the Guardian. While experts also pointed to the role of overfishing in marine life loss, marine ecologist and study lead author Dr Shahar Chaikin told the outlet: “Our research proves exactly what that biological cost [of warming] looks like underwater.”
- TOO HOT FOR COFFEE: According to new analysis by Climate Central, countries where coffee beans are grown “are becoming too hot to cultivate them”, reported the Guardian. The world’s top five coffee-growing countries faced “57 additional days of coffee-harming heat” annually because of climate change, it added.
Spotlight
Nature talks inch forward
This week, Carbon Brief covers the latest round of negotiations under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which occurred in Rome over 16-19 February.
The penultimate set of biodiversity negotiations before October’s Conference of the Parties ended in Rome last week, leaving plenty of unfinished business.
The CBD’s subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) met in the Italian capital for four days to discuss a range of issues, including biodiversity finance and reviewing progress towards the nature targets agreed under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).
However, many of the major sticking points – particularly around finance – will have to wait until later this summer, leaving some observers worried about the capacity for delegates to get through a packed agenda at COP17.
The SBI, along with the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA) will both meet in Nairobi, Kenya, later this summer for a final round of talks before COP17 kicks off in Yerevan, Armenia, on 19 October.
Money talks
Finance for nature has long been a sticking point at negotiations under the CBD.
Discussions on a new fund for biodiversity derailed biodiversity talks in Cali, Colombia, in autumn 2024, requiring resumed talks a few months later.
Despite this, finance was barely on the agenda at the SBI meetings in Rome. Delegates discussed three studies on the relationship between debt sustainability and implementation of nature plans, but the more substantive talks are set to take place at the next SBI meeting in Nairobi.
Several parties “highlighted concerns with the imbalance of work” on finance between these SBI talks and the next ones, reported Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB).
Lim Li Ching, senior researcher at Third World Network, noted that tensions around finance permeated every aspect of the talks. She told Carbon Brief:
“If you’re talking about the gender plan of action – if there’s little or no financial resources provided to actually put it into practice and implement it, then it’s [just] paper, right? Same with the reporting requirements and obligations.”
Monitoring and reporting
Closely linked to the issue of finance is the obligations of parties to report on their progress towards the goals and targets of the GBF.
Parties do so through the submission of national reports.
Several parties at the talks pointed to a lack of timely funding for driving delays in their reporting, according to ENB.
A note released by the CBD Secretariat in December said that no parties had submitted their national reports yet; by the time of the SBI meetings, only the EU had. It further noted that just 58 parties had submitted their national biodiversity plans, which were initially meant to be published by COP16, in October 2024.
Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity and infrastructure policy at the environmental not-for-profit Nature Conservancy, told Carbon Brief that despite the sparse submissions, parties are “very focused on the national report preparation”. She added:
“Everybody wants to be able to show that we’re on the path and that there still is a pathway to getting to 2030 that’s positive and largely in the right direction.”
Watch, read, listen
NET LOSS: Nigeria’s marine life is being “threatened” by “ghost gear” – nets and other fishing equipment discarded in the ocean – said Dialogue Earth.
COMEBACK CAUSALITY: A Vox long-read looked at whether Costa Rica’s “payments for ecosystem services” programme helped the country turn a corner on deforestation.
HOMEGROWN GOALS: A Straits Times podcast discussed whether import-dependent Singapore can afford to shelve its goal to produce 30% of its food locally by 2030.
‘RUSTING’ RIVERS: The Financial Times took a closer look at a “strange new force blighting the [Arctic] landscape”: rivers turning rust-orange due to global warming.
New science
- Lakes in the Congo Basin’s peatlands are releasing carbon that is thousands of years old | Nature Geoscience
- Natural non-forest ecosystems – such as grasslands and marshlands – were converted for agriculture at four times the rate of land with tree cover between 2005 and 2020 | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Around one-quarter of global tree-cover loss over 2001-22 was driven by cropland expansion, pastures and forest plantations for commodity production | Nature Food
In the diary
- 2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean | Brasília
- 5 March: Nepal general elections
- 9-20 March: First part of the thirty-first session of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) | Kingston, Jamaica
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz.
Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 25 February 2026: Food inflation strikes | El Niño looms | Biodiversity talks stagnate
For millions of consumers, the sustainability scheme stickers found on everything from bananas to chocolate bars and wooden furniture are a way to choose products that are greener and more ethical than some of the alternatives.
Inga Petersen, executive director of the Global Battery Alliance (GBA), is on a mission to create a similar scheme for one of the building blocks of the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy systems: batteries.
“Right now, it’s a race to the bottom for whoever makes the cheapest battery,” Petersen told Climate Home News in an interview.
The GBA is working with industry, international organisations, NGOs and governments to establish a sustainable and transparent battery value chain by 2030.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is to create a marketplace where products can compete on elements other than price,” Petersen said.
Under the GBA’s plan, digital product passports and traceability would be used to issue product-level sustainability certifications, similar to those commonplace in other sectors such as forestry, Petersen said.
Managing battery boom’s risks
Over the past decade, battery deployment has increased 20-fold, driven by record-breaking electric vehicle (EV) sales and a booming market for batteries to store intermittent renewable energy.
Falling prices have been instrumental to the rapid expansion of the battery market. But the breakneck pace of growth has exposed the potential environmental and social harms associated with unregulated battery production.
From South America to Zimbabwe and Indonesia, mineral extraction and refining has led to social conflict, environmental damage, human rights violations and deforestation. In Indonesia, the nickel industry is powered by coal while in Europe, production plants have been met with strong local opposition over pollution concerns.
“We cannot manage these risks if we don’t have transparency,” Petersen said.
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The GBA was established in 2017 in response to concerns about the battery industry’s impact as demand was forecast to boom and reports of child labour in the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of the Congo made headlines.
The alliance’s initial 19 members recognised that the industry needed to scale rapidly but with “social, environmental and governance guardrails”, said Petersen, who previously worked with the UN Environment Programme to develop guiding principles to minimise the environmental impact of mining.
Digital battery passport
Today, the alliance is working to develop a global certification scheme that will recognise batteries that meet minimum thresholds across a set of environmental, social and governance benchmarks it has defined along the entire value chain.
Participating mines, manufacturing plants and recycling facilities will have to provide data for their greenhouse gas emissions as well as how they perform against benchmarks for assessing biodiversity loss, pollution, child and forced labour, community impacts and respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples, for example.
The data will be independently verified, scored, aggregated and recorded on a battery passport – a digital record of the battery’s composition, which will include the origin of its raw materials and its performance against the GBA’s sustainability benchmarks.
The scheme is due to launch in 2027.
A carrot and a stick
Since the start of the year, some of the world’s largest battery companies have been voluntarily participating in the biggest pilot of the scheme to date.
More than 30 companies across the EV battery and stationary storage supply chains are involved, among them Chinese battery giants CATL and BYD subsidiary FinDreams Battery, miner Rio Tinto, battery producers Samsung SDI and Siemens, automotive supplier Denso and Tesla.
Petersen said she was “thrilled” about support for the scheme. Amid a growing pushback against sustainability rules and standards, “these companies are stepping up to send a public signal that they are still committed to a sustainable and responsible battery value chain,” she said.
There are other motivations for battery producers to know where components in their batteries have come from and whether they have been produced responsibly.
In 2023, the EU adopted a law regulating the batteries sold on its market.
From 2027, it mandates all batteries to meet environmental and safety criteria and to have a digital passport accessed via a QR code that contains information about the battery’s composition, its carbon footprint and its recycling content.
The GBA certification is not intended as a compliance instrument for the EU law but it will “add a carrot” by recognising manufacturers that go beyond meeting the bloc’s rules on nature and human rights, Petersen said.
Raising standards in complex supply chain
But challenges remain, in part due to the complexity of battery supply chains.
In the case of timber, “you have a single input material but then you have a very complex range of end products. For batteries, it’s almost the reverse,” Petersen said.
The GBA wants its certification scheme to cover all critical minerals present in batteries, covering dozens of different mining, processing and manufacturing processes and hundreds of facilities.
“One of the biggest impacts will be rewarding the leading performers through preferential access to capital, for example, with investors choosing companies that are managing their risk responsibly and transparently,” Petersen said.
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It could help influence public procurement and how companies, such as EV makers, choose their suppliers, she added. End consumers will also be able to access a summary of the GBA’s scores when deciding which product to buy.
US, Europe rush to build battery supply chain
Today, the GBA has more than 150 members across the battery value chain, including more than 50 companies, of which over a dozen are Chinese firms.
China produces over three-quarters of batteries sold globally and it dominates the world’s battery recycling capacity, leaving the US and Europe scrambling to reduce their dependence on Beijing by building their own battery supply chains.
Petersen hopes the alliance’s work can help build trust in the sector amid heightened geopolitical tensions. “People want to know where the materials are coming from and which actors are involved,” she said.
At the same time, companies increasingly recognise that failing to manage sustainability risks can threaten their operations. Protests over environmental concerns have shut down mines and battery factories across the world.
“Most companies know that and that’s why they’re making these efforts,” Petersen added.
The post Battery passport plan aims to clean up the industry powering clean energy appeared first on Climate Home News.
Battery passport plan aims to clean up the industry powering clean energy
Climate Change
Reheating plastic food containers: what science says about microplastics and chemicals in ready meals
How often do you eat takeaway food? What about pre-prepared ready meals? Or maybe just microwaving some leftovers you had in the fridge? In any of these cases, there’s a pretty good chance the container was made out of plastic. Considering that they can be an extremely affordable option, are there any potential downsides we need to be aware of? We decided to investigate.
Scientific research increasingly shows that heating food in plastic packaging can release microplastics and plastic chemicals into the food we eat. A new Greenpeace International review of peer-reviewed studies finds that microwaving plastic food containers significantly increases this release, raising concerns about long-term human health impacts. This article summarises what the science says, what remains uncertain, and what needs to change.
There’s no shortage of research showing how microplastics and nanoplastics have made their way throughout the environment, from snowy mountaintops and Arctic ice, into the beetles, slugs, snails and earthworms at the bottom of the food chain. It’s a similar story with humans, with microplastics found in blood, placenta, lungs, liver and plenty of other places. On top of this, there’s some 16,000 chemicals known to be either present or used in plastic, with a bit over a quarter of those chemicals already identified as being of concern. And there are already just under 1,400 chemicals that have been found in people.
Not just food packaging, but plenty of household items either contain or are made from plastic, meaning they potentially could be a source of exposure as well. So if microplastics and chemicals are everywhere (including inside us), how are they getting there? Should we be concerned that a lot of our food is packaged in plastic?
Greenpeace analysis of 24 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals found that the plastics we use to package our food are directly risking our health.
Heating food in plastic packaging dramatically increases the levels of microplastics and chemicals that leach into our food.
Plastic food packaging: the good, the bad, and the ugly
The growing trend towards ready meals, online shopping and restaurant delivery, and away from home-prepared meals and individual grocery shopping, is happening in every region of the world. Since the first microwaveable TV dinners were introduced in the US in the 1950s to sell off excess stock of turkey meat after Thanksgiving holidays, pre-packaged ready meals have grown hugely in sales. The global market is worth $190bn in 2025, and is expected to reach a total volume of 71.5 million tonnes by 2030. It’s also predicted that the top five global markets for convenience food (China, USA, Japan, Mexico and Russia) will remain relatively unchanged up to 2030, with the most revenue in 2019 generated by the North America region.
A new report from Greenpeace International set out to analyse articles in peer-reviewed, scientific journals to look at what exactly the research has to say about plastic food packaging and food contact plastics.
Here’s what we found.
Our review of 24 recent articles highlights a consistent picture that regulators, businesses and
consumers should be concerned about: when food is packaged in plastic and then microwaved, this significantly increases the risk of both microplastic and chemical release, and that these microplastics and chemicals will leach into the food inside the packaging.
And not just some, but a lot of microplastics and chemicals.
When polystyrene and polypropylene containers filled with water were microwaved after being stored in the fridge or freezer, one study found they released anywhere between 100,000-260,000 microplastic particles, and another found that five minutes of microwave heating could release between 326,000-534,000 particles into food.
Similarly there are a wide range of chemicals that can be and are released when plastic is heated. Across different plastic types, there are estimated to be around 16,000 different chemicals that can either be used or present in plastics, and of these around 4,200 are identified as being hazardous, whilst many others lack any form of identification (hazardous or otherwise) at all.
The research also showed that 1,396 food contact plastic chemicals have been found in humans, several of which are known to be hazardous to human health. At the same time, there are many chemicals for which no research into the long-term effects on human health exists.
Ultimately, we are left with evidence pointing towards increased release of microplastics and plastic chemicals into food from heating, the regular migration of microplastics and chemicals into food, and concerns around what long-term impacts these substances have on human health, which range from uncertain to identified harm.
The known unknowns of plastic chemicals and microplastics
The problem here (aside from the fact that plastic chemicals are routinely migrating into our food), is that often we don’t have any clear research or information on what long-term impacts these chemicals have on human health. This is true of both the chemicals deliberately used in plastic production (some of which are absolutely toxic, like antimony which is used to make PET plastic), as well as in what’s called non-intentionally added substances (NIAS).
NIAS refers to chemicals which have been found in plastic, and typically originate as impurities, reaction by-products, or can even form later when meals are heated. One study found that a UV stabiliser plastic additive reacted with potato starch when microwaved to create a previously unknown chemical compound.
We’ve been here before: lessons from tobacco, asbestos and lead
Although none of this sounds particularly great, this is not without precedence. Between what we do and don’t know, waiting for perfect evidence is costly both economically and in terms of human health. With tobacco, asbestos, and lead, a similar story to what we’re seeing now has played out before. After initial evidence suggesting problems and toxicity, lobbyists from these industries pushed back to sow doubt about the scientific validity of the findings, delaying meaningful action. And all the while, between 1950-2000, tobacco alone led to the deaths of around 60 million people. Whilst distinguishing between correlation and causation, and finding proper evidence is certainly important, it’s also important to take preventative action early, rather than wait for more people to be hurt in order to definitively prove the point.
Where to from here?
This is where adopting the precautionary principle comes in. This means shifting the burden of proof away from consumers and everyone else to prove that a product is definitely harmful (e.g. it’s definitely this particular plastic that caused this particular problem), and onto the manufacturer to prove that their product is definitely safe. This is not a new idea, and plenty of examples of this exist already, such as the EU’s REACH regulation, which is centred around the idea of “no data, no market” – manufacturers are obligated to provide data demonstrating the safety of their product in order to be sold.
Greenpeace analysis of 24 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals found that the plastics we use to package our food are directly risking our health.
Heating food in plastic packaging dramatically increases the levels of microplastics and chemicals that leach into our food.
But as it stands currently, the precautionary principle isn’t applied to plastics. For REACH in particular, plastics are assessed on a risk-based approach, which means that, as the plastic industry itself has pointed out, something can be identified as being extremely hazardous, but is still allowed to be used in production if the leached chemical stays below “safe” levels, despite that for some chemicals a “safe” low dose is either undefined, unknown, or doesn’t exist.
A better path forward
Governments aren’t acting fast enough to reduce our exposure and protect our health. There’s no shortage of things we can do to improve this situation. The most critical one is to make and consume less plastic. This is a global problem that requires a strong Global Plastics Treaty that reduces global plastic production by at least 75% by 2040 and eliminates harmful plastics and chemicals. And it’s time that corporations take this growing threat to their customers’ health seriously, starting with their food packaging and food contact products. Here are a number of specific actions policymakers and companies can take, and helpful hints for consumers.
Policymakers & companies
- Implement the precautionary principle:
- For policymakers – Stop the use of hazardous plastics and chemicals, on the basis of their intrinsic risk, rather than an assessment of “safe” levels of exposure.
- For companies – Commit to ensure that there is a “zero release” of microplastics and hazardous chemicals from packaging into food, alongside an Action Plan with milestones to achieve this by 2035
- Stop giving false assurances to consumers about “microwave safe” containers
- Stop the use of single-use and plastic packaging, and implement policies and incentives to foster the uptake of reuse systems and non-toxic packaging alternatives.
Consumers
- Encourage your local supermarkets and shops to shift away from plastic where possible
- Avoid using plastic containers when heating/reheating food
- Use non-plastic refill containers
Trying to dodge plastic can be exhausting. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re not alone. We can only do so much in this broken plastic-obsessed system. Plastic producers and polluters need to be held accountable, and governments need to act faster to protect the health of people and the planet. We urgently need global governments to accelerate a justice-centred transition to a healthier, reuse-based, zero-waste future. Ensure your government doesn’t waste this once-in-a-generation opportunity to end the age of plastic.
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