Welcome to Carbon Brief’s China Briefing.
China Briefing handpicks and explains the most important climate and energy stories from China over the past fortnight. Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
China confirms climate commitment
XI’S NOT FOR TURNING: Chinese president Xi Jinping confirmed that the country’s 2035 “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) will cover the “entire scope of the economy, including all greenhouse gases” and be published before COP30, Bloomberg reported. It added that these comments, made at a virtual meeting of global leaders, signaled that “China won’t back off from its ambitions” on climate change, despite economic and geopolitical challenges. Reuters noted that Xi also flagged that “China’s actions to address climate change will not slow down”. As “Xi’s first international appearance on climate change since 2021”, the speech “sends a clear signal of China’s support for multilateralism”, Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told Bloomberg. Nevertheless, campaign group Greenpeace East Asia global policy advisor Yao Zhe “cautioned against” interpreting it as meaning that an ambitious climate pledge is “guaranteed”, Climate Home News said, adding that it “remains an open question, especially given the ongoing tariff war with the US”.
BRAZIL’S INFLUENCE: The meeting was part of a broader campaign by COP30 host Brazil to persuade China, the EU and other powers “to commit to cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep global warming well below 2C”, Reuters reported. Shortly before the meeting, Huang Runqiu, head of China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, reaffirmed China’s commitment to tackle climate change at a meeting with COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago in Beijing, according to China Environment News. Corrêa do Lago later told journalists he believes China is developing a “very ambitious” climate pledge, Bloomberg said.
GREEN BRICS: At a meeting in Rio de Janeiro, the foreign ministers of BRICS member states “reinforce[d the] group’s commitment to climate action”, according to a press statement published on the bloc’s website. Meanwhile, Xi visited the headquarters of the New Development Bank, a multilateral development bank established by BRICS, where he called on the bank to “implement more…green finance projects, so as to help developing countries…accelerate their green and low-carbon transformation”, the state-run newspaper China Daily reported. A China Daily editorial noted: “The BRICS countries are working together to help…developing countries finance the fight against climate change”. However, Reuters covered new research finding that Chinese companies are still building 7.7GW of new coal capacity overseas, mostly in BRICS member Indonesia, counter to China’s 2021 pledge to “stop financing coal projects overseas”.
Solar and wind outweigh fossil fuels
RENEWABLES REIGN: China’s combined wind and solar capacity has exceeded that of thermal sources (火电, which mainly refers to coal and gas) for the first time in history, industry news outlet BJX News reported, with 74 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar installations in the first quarter of 2025 bringing total capacity up to 1,482GW. This compares to 1,451GW of thermal power, the outlet added. Finance outlet Caixin noted that wind and solar capacity had already topped coal power (煤电) capacity in July last year. In a press conference, a National Energy Administration (NEA) official indicated that solar and wind capacity additions will continue to surpass thermal additions in the long-term, according to BJX News. Writing on Bluesky, Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), wrote that the high number of new solar and wind additions showed a “huge rush to install capacity” before subsidies are cut off in July under the forthcoming market-based renewables pricing policy.
NEW NUCLEAR: Meanwhile, China has approved the construction of 10 new nuclear reactors, Shanghai-based news outlet Jiemian said. The units will have a combined capacity of at least 12GW, according to Carbon Brief calculations, bringing China’s total nuclear capacity to 113GW once built, according to state broadcaster CCTV. The country has also formalised a ban on new “captive” coal-fired power plants in an updated list of business areas in which companies in China are not allowed to operate for 2025, BJX News reported.
MARKET REFORM: A new notice on regional spot markets for electricity was issued, BJX News said, mandating several provinces to begin either “official operations” or trial operations, with the goal of spot markets covering the whole nation by the end of 2025. China enacted “basic rules” for ancillary services markets for the power grid, finance news outlet East Money said, which includes defining the scope for grid-regulating services, operating practices and cost mechanisms for the sector. An analysis in China Electric Power News noted that the issuance of these rules marks the establishment of trading rules for the “three major trading types” – medium- and long-term markets, spot markets and ancillary services – in an “important step” for power market reform.
INDUSTRY AND TRANSPORT: China has called for electrification to account for 10% of the transport sector’s total “end-use energy consumption” by 2027 and for battery electric vehicles (EVs) to make up the majority of new car sales by 2035, East Money reported. Separately, China has issued its first “green hydrogen certificate”, which was awarded to a “solar + grid power” hydrogen project, the Substack China Hydrogen Bulletin reported.
Tariffs, export controls and executive orders
THOUSAND-PERCENT TARIFFS: The US has “announced plans to impose tariffs” ranging from 41-3,521% on solar panels imported from south-east Asian countries, many of which are manufactured by Chinese companies in the region, BBC News reported. Chinese companies are likely to embrace relocating to countries other than the US, the New York Times said, as the “profit margins on solar exports to the US are high enough that relocation will be worth it, even with continuing tariff uncertainty”.
-
Sign up to Carbon Brief’s free “China Briefing” email newsletter. All you need to know about the latest developments relating to China and climate change. Sent to your inbox every Thursday.
MINERAL FLOWS: China’s exports of critical metals to the US have “plung[ed]” in recent weeks, with “shipments of several critical items halting entirely in March”, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported. The shortage of minerals, which are “vital for EVs, wind turbines” and other clean-energy technologies, the Financial Times reported, could “cause shutdowns in automotive production…if Beijing fully chokes off exports”. Meanwhile, China has criticised a new US executive order “aimed at stepping up deep-sea mining” to increase access to key minerals, saying the move “violates international law”, according to BBC News.
Spotlight
China issues new ‘action plan’ to control HFC emissions
China issued a new “action plan” in April to control hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), potent greenhouse gases (GHGs) that could significantly increase short-term climate warming.
In this issue, Carbon Brief assesses its potential impact on China’s GHG emissions.
Short-term pollutant
HFCs are man-made GHGs that can be several thousand times stronger at absorbing heat than carbon dioxide (CO2). One type, HFC-23, is 10,000 times more powerful than CO2.
They are used in a number of appliances, particularly as coolants for fridges and air conditioning.
Efforts to phase them out are governed by the 2016 Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances, which China ratified in 2021.
China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of HFCs, accounting for more than 70% of global production and 50% of consumption. It also produces and consumes the majority of the appliances that use them.
Its HFC emissions stood at 273m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2020, according to the government’s recently-submitted GHG inventory. This is equivalent to more than 2% of China’s CO2 emissions that year, which totalled 11bn tonnes.
Despite HFCs’ relatively low share in overall GHG emissions, their absorption strength necessitates their inclusion in climate strategies, says Sun Xiaopu, senior China counsel at the thinktank Institute For Governance and Sustainable Development (IGSD).
She told Carbon Brief that mitigating HFCs will help avoid “short-term global warming” and climate tipping points.
Action plan for 2030
The government’s plan sets targets and timelines for “gradually reducing” production and consumption of appliances using HFCs by 2030, as well as reducing or banning consumption of ozone-depleting substances (ODSs).
These include lowering HFC production by 2029 by 10% from a 2024 baseline of 2bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2e). Consumption would also be reduced 10% from a baseline of 900MtCO2e in this timeframe. This aligns with China’s obligations under the Kigali Amendment.
From 2026, China will “prohibit” the production of fridges and freezers using HFC refrigerants.
From 2029, it will ban the use of HFCs in most cooling systems, including air conditioners and other refrigeration equipment – prioritising the automotive, home appliance and industrial cooling sectors.
To enforce this, China will take measures such as requiring licences for manufacturing and consumption of controlled HFCs, improving monitoring of the production of HFC-23, as well as encouraging recycling of HFC refrigerants, and imposing import and export quotas for HFC refrigerants (although not the appliances that use them).
The plan will also introduce “stricter legal liabilities and higher financial penalties” to deter non-compliance, said Zheng Tan, programme officer of the industry programme at the climate nonprofit Energy Foundation.
He told Carbon Brief this is a “crucial step” in strengthening China’s existing HFC policy framework.
Tightening controls
Although China has controlled HFCs for some time, efforts accelerated after 2021, Hu Jianxin, a professor at Peking University’s College of Environmental Science and Engineering and Kigali Amendment negotiator, told Environment China.
China has shown willingness to act ambitiously on HFCs before. It issued a notice to freeze domestic production capacity for five widely-used HFCs in 2021, two years earlier than its international obligations required.
The government reported, prior to the action plan, that its HFC controls saw production quotas in 2024 fall by 404MtCO2e and consumption quotas fall by 262MtCO2e year-on-year.
There is scope for ambitious HFC action to continue, Sun told Carbon Brief.
Non-government bodies could use “vertical” communication channels, such as panels of technological, economic and scientific experts, to feed governments information, she added, helping them understand the feasibility of higher targets, “leapfrog obsolete technologies” or address roadblocks to adopting alternative solutions.
Hu noted that industry representatives have been consulted on HFC controls, which could encourage greater compliance – in contrast to reports of companies previously flouting ODS production controls.
Nevertheless, he told Environment China industry could “always do more”, adding that, while some sectors could stop using HFCs immediately, others may need decades – although he did not clarify which sectors, or why.
Sun speculates that this may be because the patents for these alternatives are held by non-Chinese companies, creating barriers for Chinese companies to discover new solutions.
The climate thinktank Institute for Global Decarbonisation Progress found that Chinese companies hold only 14% of patents for one such group of compounds, hydrofluoroolefins.
Beyond patents, it added, alternatives “often encounter challenges related to safety, cost or energy efficiency”.
According to Zheng, developing “effective monitoring, reporting and verification tools and capacity-building measures”, policy support to increase demand for less damaging alternatives and developing science-based standards will be important for enhancing compliance.
Furthermore, China’s action plan only applies to appliances using HFC refrigerants within China, Sun said. Companies making such appliances for export are not subject to its controls.
A report co-authored by IGSD and the appliance-focused nonprofit Collaborative Labeling and Appliance Standards Program found that Chinese companies, among others, are “dumping” inefficient air-conditioning units that use HFC refrigerants in south-east Asia.
Halting this trade, the report said, could “result in a reduction of over 1GtCO2e over 25 years”.
Watch, read, listen
CHINA 101: The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission held a congressional hearing on China’s energy landscape and its geopolitical implications, featuring a number of experts on China’s energy and climate developments.
GREEN FINANCE: The East Asia Forum published an article by Christoph Nedopil Wang, director of the Griffith Asia Institute, on how China can cooperate with other Asian countries to “set a global example for green economic growth”.
COOPERATION AND COMPETITION: The European Guanxi podcast explored how EU-China climate cooperation could navigate tensions around carbon taxes and EV pricing.
EMPTY BARRELS: A new report by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies outlined three potential scenarios for how China’s rising EV adoption will affect oil demand, finding it could fall by 600,000 barrels per day by 2030.
70%
The reduction in rainfall in the southern province of Guizhou since November last year, compared to average levels in previous years, as it battles a “lingering drought that has severely affected rural communities”, the state-run newspaper China Daily reported. Temperatures in April averaged 12.7C, marking the “second-highest national average temperature recorded” for the month since 1961, according to the state-supporting news outlet Global Times.
New science
Construction and analysis of China’s carbon emission model based on machine learning
Scientific Reports
A new study used machine learning to calculate a possible carbon emissions trajectory for China through to 2030. It mapped China’s carbon emissions to nine explanatory variables, including the “proportion of coal in total energy consumption and urbanisation rate”. As a result, the model estimates that China’s carbon emissions will “level off from 2022 to 2028 and peak in 2028”, with annual emissions in 2030 “expected to be about 9.72bn tonnes”.
Scientific Reports
New research examined the predictions of CMIP6 models for annual cycles of surface air temperature over China, “one of the most profound manifestations of global warming”. The study examined historical and future monthly temperatures under three different shared socioeconomic pathways. The study found that, under the model, the “amplitude” – or spread between the highest and lowest temperatures in a given year – would be narrower in future, although it noted that the patterns of likely temperature changes differ regionally, and particularly between northern and southern China.
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 1 May 2025: Xi steadfast on climate; Solar and wind surpassed thermal power; Controlling short-term GHGs 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.”
