China’s climate ambition at this year’s “two sessions” (两会), which ended on 11 March, was relatively subdued, with analysts expecting economic concerns to trump climate action in the year ahead.
The “two sessions”, which takes place every spring, is a major political event held in Beijing that gives an indication of China’s broad policy direction for the year.
It covers every area of governance, including energy and climate policy.
In this article, Carbon Brief outlines key signals from the 2025 “two sessions”, including: a new energy target for 2025; clean-energy and climate priorities; the ongoing development of coal in a “supporting role”; and China’s response to “green trade barriers”.
This is an update of Carbon Brief’s 6 March China Briefing newsletter, expanded to cover developments during the last few days of the event.
A key meeting
The “two sessions” (两会) is the annual gathering of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). This year, it ran from 4 to 11 March.
The gathering is attended by Chinese Communist party members, as well as members of other political parties, academics, industry leaders and other prominent figures, known as delegates or deputies.
Its centrepiece is the “government work report”, a speech delivered by the premier – the head of China’s State Council, the top body of the country’s central government. This outlines the previous year’s achievements and priorities for the year ahead, including the annual GDP target.
At the meeting, China also releases a report by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the country’s top economic planning body, as well as a central and local government budget report.
In addition, the event allows thousands of delegates to meet and raise policy proposals with senior government officials.
Low energy target
China pledged to reduce energy intensity – a measure of energy consumption per unit of GDP – by 3% in 2025, the work report said. (This measure now excludes renewables and nuclear, meaning it only applies to fossil fuels.)
This target means China is “on track to miss its 14th five-year plan energy intensity target”, Yao Zhe, global policy advisor at Greenpeace East Asia, tells Carbon Brief.
She adds that it was an “inconvenient truth” that China’s economy has not become much more energy efficient in recent years, “offset[ting]…the decarbonisation effects of renewable technology deployment”.
China is lagging behind on its 2026 targets for reducing both energy intensity and carbon intensity – the amount of CO2 emissions per unit of GDP. Analysis for Carbon Brief has shown that they would need to fall by 6% and 7% per year, respectively, to meet the targets.
In its report, the NDRC attributed the shortfall in China’s 2024 carbon-intensity reduction figures to “rapid growth in the energy consumption in industries and the civilian sector as a result of post-Covid economic recovery and frequent extreme weather events”.
Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), wrote on Bluesky that the low target “shows the government is not prioritising controlling carbon dioxide (CO2) at the moment”.
He also said the new methodology for calculating energy intensity would, in theory, allow fossil-fuel demand to grow by 1.9% in 2025, pushing CO2 emissions up by more than 2%. (He added that he did not think this would actually happen.)
The 14th five-year plan’s carbon-intensity target, which measures CO2 emissions per unit of GDP, will likely also be missed, according to the Carbon Brief analysis. China does not typically announce annual carbon-intensity targets in the government work report.
The targets that were announced underscored that “economic growth remains the top priority, with environmental goals taking a backseat”, Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub and senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI), tells Carbon Brief.
The lack of an annual carbon-intensity target was “a further sign of carbon reduction being downplayed”, he adds.
Priorities in 2025
China’s climate and energy policy in 2025 will likely follow well-established priorities, such as balancing decarbonisation and energy security, based on the report’s language.
The state-run newspaper China Daily highlighted the report’s support of China’s “dual-carbon” goals on its frontpage, saying that China pledged to “diligently work” towards them.
According to the work report, China “will develop a package of major projects for climate change response and actively engage in and steer global environmental and climate governance”.
A number of climate measures were announced, but Li tells Carbon Brief that there were “no major surprises”, confirming his view that the “two sessions” has “increasingly become a platform to confirm pre-existing decisions rather than introduce new ones”.
Each year, the government work report lists a number of top priorities for the year ahead, as shown in the figure below.
For 2025, the report lowers the importance of high-quality development in favour of “expanding domestic demand”. The prioritisation of “low-carbon development” and other climate related tasks remained the same compared to 2024.
Ranking of key tasks in each government work report during the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025). Source: Xinhua publications of the government work reports for 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021.
The report discusses China’s climate and environment efforts for 2025 under the title:
“Making coordinated efforts to cut carbon emissions, reduce pollution, pursue green development, and boost economic growth and accelerat[e] the green transition in all areas of economic and social development.”
This stands in stark contrast to the climate section’s title last year, which only highlighted “enhancing ecological conservation and promoting green and low-carbon development”.
The expanded wording signals a more “comprehensive design at the policy level” to “systematically enhance the integration of different sectors for tackling environmental problems”, Xu Song, a registered environment evaluator in China, wrote on his WeChat account.
The work report lists a number of climate initiatives for the year ahead, including: expanding pilot programmes for local governments to peak carbon emissions; building “zero-carbon industrial parks”; accelerating the shift from “dual-control” of energy to dual-control of carbon emissions; and including more industries in the national carbon market.
Most importantly, renewable energy buildouts will continue, with a particular focus on “new energy bases in desert areas, the Gobi and other arid areas”, as well as offshore wind. The report also recognises the need for China to upgrade its electricity grid to cope with vast renewables additions.
But the report also continues to commit to fossil-fuel infrastructure. It reiterates calls to “better ensure both development and security”, which for the energy sector means that China should pursue a low-carbon transition while ensuring sufficient energy supply by keeping some fossil-fuel capacity.
This year, it says China will launch “low-carbon upgrade trials” for coal-fired power plants, which are seen as necessary for energy security. (Recent analysis found that a “substantial amount” of new coal capacity will soon come online.)
The separate NDRC report also reinforces coal as having a “basic supporting role” , announcing that China will “continue to increase coal production”.
The table below compares the language used in relation to coal in government work reports from 2021-2025.
| 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| While promoting the clean and efficient use of coal, we will make a major push to develop new energy sources, and take active and well-ordered steps to develop nuclear energy on the basis of ensuring its safe use. |
We will work to upgrade coal-fired power plants to conserve resources, reduce carbon emissions, make operations more flexible, and upgrade heating facilities. | We leveraged the role of coal as a major source of energy, increased advanced coal production capacity and stepped up support for power plants and heat-supply enterprises to ensure energy supplies. | We will see that coal and coal-fired power play their crucial role in ensuring energy supply and our energy supply meets the needs of economic and social development. | Low-carbon upgrade trials will be launched in coal-fired power plants. |
A table comparing the language used around coal in government work reports during the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025). Source: Xinhua publications of the government work reports for 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021.
Ilaria Mazzocco, senior fellow with the trustee chair in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), tells Carbon Brief that the signal that coal would only have a supporting role in the future energy system was a “good sign”, but that the language underscored that there is “little interest” in phasing out coal “for now”.
The NDRC also pledged to reduce steel output and to encourage oil refiners to produce more petrochemical products instead of fuel.
Consumption and ‘involution’
Boosting domestic consumption is seen as key to achieving China’s 2025 GDP target of 5%. Consequently, it replaces fostering innovation as the top priority for policymakers for the year, as shown in the chart above.
China’s approach to boosting growth includes a number of stimulus measures. The net impact of these measures on China’s emissions, such via the building of energy-intensive infrastructure, is currently unknown, however.
At this year’s meeting, the government stated that domestic consumption will be the “main engine” for economic growth in 2025.
“The big question mark is real estate and construction”, Myllyvirta tells Carbon Brief. Real estate and construction have been the biggest driver of domestic consumption for decades.
However, Myllyvirta adds that the government would likely aim for stable growth in the sector, rather than stimulating it with rapid and energy-intensive growth.
In part, China is putting its hopes – and 300bn yuan ($41bn) – into a consumer trade-in programme, which will likely continue to allow drivers to swap combustion-engine cars for “new-energy” vehicles (NEVs, which refers to electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids).
The report also pledges to incentivise “eco-friendly consumption”.
While technological innovation remains a major priority, clean-energy technologies are not explicitly mentioned in the government work report in this context.
Last year’s government work report emphasised the need to “consolidate and enhance [China’s] leading position” in industries such as NEVs and hydrogen, as well as to “create new ways of storing energy”.
Nevertheless, according to power news outlet BJX News, this is not a signal that clean-energy technologies are out of favour, but rather a sign that they are already widely recognised as an essential part of China’s technology strategy.
Similarly, although hydrogen is not explicitly named as a “future industry” in the government work report, the NDRC confirmed it will receive support from a one trillion yuan ($138bn) fund that will be issued for “frontier fields”.
In its budget report, China’s Ministry of Finance pledges to “steadily promote” China’s climate action, such as by strengthening financial support for R&D for low-carbon technologies, enhancing the development of renewable energy, promoting NEVs and developing green finance standards and institutions.
This year’s government work report also emphasises the need to combat “rat-race competition” – a reference to what is described in China as “involution”. This term refers to the overcrowded markets and price wars plaguing some sectors, including NEVs and solar panels. The report states it will take “comprehensive” steps to address the problem.
The NDRC report notes that the government will take steps to “promote orderly development” of the NEV, lithium-ion battery and solar industries, underscoring government concerns about the sector.
Nevertheless, the government does recognise the importance of clean-energy technologies to economic growth, Mazzocco tells Carbon Brief. She explains:
“Energy is now seen as a tool to ensure the economy can grow rapidly and is meant to support technological transformation…Climate per se is not a goal that the Chinese government wants to prioritise over economic growth and international competition.”
Geopolitics
Trade tensions that underpinned the political atmosphere during last year’s two sessions have been exacerbated by a number of developments since then – particularly around export controls and tariffs.
This is reflected in the work report, which notes that “increasingly complex and severe” geopolitical tensions may “exert a greater impact on China in areas such as trade, science and technology”.
In response, the government will “take active steps to respond to green trade barriers” – pointing to the trade measures above as well as the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) – the report says.
However, in a press conference at the event, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said that he believed China and the EU had the “capacity and wisdom” to resolve disagreements through consultations.
China will also continue to help African nations develop in “green sectors”, Wang said, building on language in the government work report that pledges to continue with “high-quality” projects in Belt and Road Initiative partner countries.
Extreme weather
There was continued recognition of the drag of “natural disasters” on China’s economic growth, with the work report pledging to “better guard against and respond” to floods, droughts, typhoons and other extreme weather events.
The report notes that floods “occurred frequently in some parts of China” last year. This was not explicitly linked to climate change.
However, the NDRC report attributes China’s failure to meet its energy-intensity goal in 2024 to, in part, “frequent extreme weather events”.
A recent Carbon Brief analysis found that, of 114 attribution studies for Chinese extreme weather events, 88 had their “severity or likelihood” increased by climate change.
Around the two sessions
Apart from the ministers and senior officials delivering work reports, side meetings between central leaders and local officials at the “two sessions” also send out political signals.
This year, President Xi Jinping met with a delegation from Jiangsu – an eastern province that is known for its affluent economy, manufacturing, strength in exports and technological innovation.
At the meeting, Xi emphasised the “need to upgrade traditional sectors and foster future sources of innovation”, although he also warned against creating industry “bubbles”, reports the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.
He added that policymakers should “actively promote high-end, intelligent and green development of industries”.
Meanwhile, MEE head Huang Runqiu emphasised the importance of low-carbon development, both in a meeting with a delegation from the northern Heilongjiang province and in a “minister’s corridor” press conference.
Delegates raised more than 700 policy proposals on “ecological civilisation” at this year’s meetings, energy news outlet BJX News reports, covering areas including addressing China’s industrial energy transition and developing the carbon market.
Among these, the US-based NPC Observer newsletter says, were two bills proposing the enactment of a “climate change response law” that would develop a legislative scheme for reducing carbon emissions.
Finally, as the meetings came to a close, NPC head Zhao Leji confirmed that the legislative body will continue to work on China’s environment and ecology code, according to news reports, as well as the atomic energy law in the year ahead.
The post Explainer: What does China’s ‘two sessions’ mean for climate policy in 2025? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Explainer: What does China’s ‘two sessions’ mean for climate policy in 2025?
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
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