Published

6 months ago

December 9, 2025

Alice Rush

Local officials are often viewed as relatively weak actors in China’s governance structure, largely implementing policies issued from the central level.

However, a new book – “Implementing a low-carbon future: climate leadership in Chinese cities” – argues that these officials play an important role in designing innovative and enduring climate policy.

The book follows how four cities – Shenzhen, Zhenjiang, Xiamen and Nanchang – approached developing low-carbon policies over the course of almost a decade.

It identifies “bridge leaders” – mid-level local bureaucrats who have a strong interest in a specific policy area and who are unlikely to move often between different posts – as key to effective local climate policymaking.

Carbon Brief interviews author Weila Gong, non-resident scholar at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy’s 21st Century China Center and visiting scholar at UC Davis, on her research.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Gong on why cities are important: “Over 85% of China’s carbon emissions come from cities. The majority of Chinese people live in cities, so the extent to which cities can become truly low-carbon will also influence China’s climate success.”
On what motivates local policymakers: “Mid-level bureaucrats need to think about how to create unique, innovative and visible policy actions to help draw attention to their region and their bosses.”
On cities as a way to test new policies: “Part of the function of local governments in China is to experiment with policy at a local level, thereby helping national-level officials develop responses to emerging policy challenges.”
On how local policymakers get results: “Even though we tend to think that local officials are very constrained in terms of policy or financial resources, they can often have the leverage and space to build coalitions.”
On uneven city-level engagement: “To begin with, all regions received political support if they joined the [low-carbon city] pilot programme. But over the years, different regions have engaged very differently.”
On the need for ‘entrepreneurial bureaucrats’: “China will always need local officials willing to introduce new legislations or try new policy instruments…For that, it needs entrepreneurial bureaucrats who are willing to turn ideas into actions.”
On international cooperation: “Even with how geopolitics is really complicating things, many cities continue to have common challenges. For example, collaboration between Shanghai and Los Angeles on green shipping corridors is still ongoing”.
On the effectiveness of mid-level bureaucrats: “They are creative, they know how to convince their boss about the importance of climate action and they know how that can bring opportunities for themselves and their boss. And because of how long they have worked in one area, they understand the local politics, policy processes and the coalitions needed to provide solutions.”

Carbon Brief: You’ve just written a book about climate policy in Chinese cities. Could you explain why subnational governments are important for China’s climate policy in general?

Weila Gong: China is the world’s largest carbon emitter, so the extent to which global efforts to address climate change can actually reach their goal is largely influenced by China’s efforts.

If you look at the structure of China’s carbon emissions, over 85% of China’s carbon emissions come from cities. The majority of Chinese people live in cities, so the extent to which cities can become truly low-carbon will also influence China’s climate success. That’s why I started to look at this research area.

We tend to think of China as a centralised, big system and a unitary state – state-run and top-down – but it actually also has multi-level governance. No climate action or national climate targets can be achieved without local engagement.

We also tend to think subnational level [actors], including the provincial, city and township levels, are barriers for environmental protection, because they are focused on promoting economic growth.

But I observed these actors participating in China’s low-carbon city pilot programme [as part of my fieldwork spanning most of the 2010s]. I was really surprised to see so many cities wanted to participate in the pilot, even though at the time there was no specific evaluation system that would reward their efforts.

We think of local governments just as implementers of central-level policy. When it comes to issues like climate change and also low-carbon development – in 2010 [policymakers found these concepts] very vague…So I was curious why those local officials would want to take on this issue, given that there was no immediate reward, either in terms of career development or in terms of increasing financial support from the central government.

CB: Could you help us understand the mindset of these bureaucrats? How do local-level officials design policies in China?

WG: The role of different local officials in promoting low-carbon policy is not very well understood. We tend to focus on top political figures, such as mayors or [municipal] party secretaries, because we see them as the most important policymakers.

But that is not entirely true. Those top local politicians are very important in supporting efforts to tackle problem areas…but the focus in my book is the mid-level bureaucrats.

Unlike mayors and party secretaries, mid-level officials tend to stay in one locality for their entire career. That helps us to understand why climate policy can become durable in some places and not others.

Mayors and party secretaries are important for [pushing through policy solutions to problem] issues, but they can also be key barriers for ensuring continuation of those policies – particularly when they change positions…as they tend to move to another locality every three to five years.

Therefore, these top-level officials are not the ones implementing low-carbon policies. That’s why I looked at the mid-level bureaucrats instead.

The conventional understanding of these bureaucrats is that they are obedient and only follow their bosses’ guidance. But actually, when low-carbon policies emerged as an important area for the central government in 2010, opportunities appeared for local governments to develop pilot projects.

Mid-level local officials saw this as a way to help their bosses – the mayors and party secretaries – increase their chances of getting promoted, which in turn would help the mid-level bureaucrats to advance their own career.

Impressing central government officials isn’t really a consideration for these officials…but their bosses need visible or more reliable local actions to show their ability to enforce low-carbon development.

As such, mid-level bureaucrats need to think about how to create unique, innovative and visible policy actions to help draw attention to their region and their bosses.

Secondly, mid-level bureaucrats are more interested in climate issues if it is in the interest of their agency or local government.

For example, Zhenjiang [a city in east China] came to be known as a leader in promoting low-carbon development due to a series of early institutional efforts to establish low-carbon development. In particular, in part because of this, it was chosen for a visit by president Xi Jinping in 2014.

As a result, the city created a specialised agency [on low-carbon development]. This made it one of the first regions to have full-time local officials that followed through on low-carbon policy implementation.

This increased their ability to declare their regulatory authority on low-carbon issues, by being able to promote new regulations, standards and so on, as well as enhancing the region’s and the local policymakers’ reputations by building institutions to ensure long-term enforcement.

Another motivation for many local governments is accessing finance through the pilot programmes. If their ideas impress the central-level government, local policymakers could get access to investment or other forms of financial resources from higher levels of government.

In the city of Nanchang, for example, officials were trying to negotiate access to external investment, because the main central government fund for low-carbon initiatives only provided minimal finance.

Nanchang officials tried to partner with the Austrian government on sustainable agriculture, working through China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

It didn’t materialise in the end, but they still created a platform to attract international investment, and gathered tens of millions of yuan [millions of dollars] in central-level support because the fact they showed they were innovating allowed them to access more money through China’s institutional channels.

CB: Could you give an example of what drives innovative local climate policies?

WG: National-level policies and pilot programme schemes provide openings for local governments to really think about how and whether they should engage more in addressing climate change.

The national government has participated in international negotiations on climate for decades…but subnational-level cities and provinces only joined national efforts to address climate issues from the 2010s – starting with the low-carbon city programme.

So we can see that local responses to addressing climate change have been shaped by the opportunities provided by the national government, [who in turn] want more local-level participation to give them successful case studies to take to international conferences.

Local carbon emission trading systems (ETSs) are an example of giving local governments opportunities to experiment.

In my book, I look at the case of Shenzhen, which launched China’s first local ETS. [Shenzhen was one of seven regions selected to run a pilot ETS, ahead of the national ETS being established in 2018.]

Part of the function of local governments in China is to experiment with policy at a local level, thereby helping national-level officials develop responses to emerging policy challenges.

I remember a moment during my field research in 2012, when I was with a group of officials from both the national and local government.

The national government officials asked the local officials to come up with some best practices and solutions, to help them envision what could be done at the national level.

Then there are drivers at the international level, which I think is very interesting.

I observed that the officials particularly willing to take on climate issues usually had access to international training.

During the early stages of subnational climate engagement, organisations such as the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) worked with the NDRC and other national-level agencies to train local officials across the country.

This created more opportunities to help local officials understand what climate change and carbon markets were, and how to use policy instruments to support low-carbon development.

In Shenzhen, local bureaucrats also turned to their international partners to help them design policy.

The city created a study group to visit partners working on the EU ETS and learn how it was designed. They learned about price volatility in the EU ETS and pushed legislation through the local people’s congress [to mitigate this in their own system].

One thing that made the Shenzhen ETS so successful is what I call “entrepreneurial bureaucrats” [who have the ability to design, push through and maintain new local-level climate policies].

Shenzhen’s vice mayor worked with the local people’s congress to push the ETS legislation through. This was the first piece of legislation in China to require compulsory participation by more than 600 local industrial actors. It also granted the local government authority to decide the quotas and scope of the ETS.

These 600 entities also included Shenzhen’s public building sector[, a powerful local interest group].

This shows that, even though we tend to think that local officials are very constrained in terms of policy or financial resources, they can often have the leverage and space to build coalitions – even in China’s more centralised political system – and know how to mobilise political support.

CB: You chose to look at the effectiveness of four cities – Shenzhen, Zhenjiang, Xiamen and Nanchang – in climate policymaking. Why did you choose these cities and how representative are they of the rest of China?

WG: We tend to believe that only economically-advanced areas or environmentally-friendly cities will become champions for low-carbon development…But I was surprised, because Zhenjiang and Nanchang are not known for having an advanced economy, but [they nevertheless built impactful climate] institutions – regulations, standards and legislation that shape individual and organisational behaviours in the long term. I thought they were interesting examples of how local regions can really create those institutions.

Then there was Xiamen, which is seen as an environmentally-friendly city and economically is comparable to Shenzhen when you look at GDP per capita. Xiamen actually did not turn its low-carbon policy experimentation into long-term institutions, instead randomly proposing new initiatives [that were not sustained].

I conducted more than 100 interviews, talking with policy-practitioners inside and outside of government about specific policies, their processes and implementation.

I found that, over the course of eight years, these [cities] showed very different levels of engagement.

Some I categorised into substantive engagement, where the local government delivered on their climate goals. [Shenzhen falls into this category.]

Then there is performative engagement – such as in the case of Nanchang – where the local government was more interested in [using climate policies to] attract external investment and access projects from higher levels of government.

But they were not able to enforce the policies, because impressing higher levels of government became the primary motivation.

Zhenjiang was a case of symbolic engagement. It actually created a lot of institutions, such as a specialised agency and a screening system to ensure new [low-carbon] investment. When I was observing Zhenjiang, from 2012 to 2018, officials recognised they needed to be carbon-constrained.

The problem was that Zhenjiang has a very strong power sector – mainly coal power – which supplies the whole eastern coast. That meant, even though the government was very determined to promote low-carbon policies, they faced [opposition from] very strong local actors – meaning the government could only partially implement the targets they set.

Then there is sporadic engagement, as seen in Xiamen. [The city’s approach to climate policy was incremental and cautious] because of a lack of political support [from officials in Xiamen], as well as local coalitions between key actors. So instead, we find random initiatives being promoted.

This explains the uneven policy implementation in China. To begin with, all regions received political support if they joined the pilot programme. But over the years, different regions have engaged very differently, in terms of the regulations, standards and legislation they have introduced, and whether those were paired with enforcement by a group of trained personnel to follow through on those initiatives.

CB: What needs to be done to strengthen sub-national climate policy making?

WG: It’s very important to have groups of personnel trained on climate policy. Since 2010, when I started studying the low-carbon pilot programme, there were no provincial-level people or agencies fully responsible for climate change. Back then, there was only the [central-level] department of climate change under the NDRC.

By the time I finished the book, provincial-level departments of climate change had been created across all provinces. But almost nothing has been established at the city level, so most city-level climate initiatives are being managed under the agencies responsible for air quality.

That means climate change is only one of those local officials’ day-to-day responsibilities. Only a handful of cities have dedicated staff working on climate issues: Beijing, Shanghai, Zhenjiang, Shenzhen and Guiyang.

Nanchang devised some of China’s first legislation to include an annual [financial] budget for low-carbon development. But when I revisited the city, officials were not actually sure about how and whether that budget was being used, because there wasn’t a person responsible for it.

Therefore, even if there are resources available, they can go unused because local officials at the city level are so busy. If climate policy is not prioritised, or written into their job responsibilities, that can be a challenge for sustaining implementation.

In China’s governance structure, the national government comes up with ideas, and the provincial level transfers these ideas down to local-level governments. City-level governments are the ones implementing these ideas.

So we need full-time staff to follow through on policies from the beginning right up to implementation.

Secondly, while almost all cities have now made carbon-peaking plans, one area in which the Chinese government can make further progress is in data.

China has recently emphasised the need to strengthen carbon-emissions data collection and monitoring. But when I was conducting my research, most Chinese cities had not yet established regular carbon-accounting systems.

As such, inadequate energy statistics and insufficient detail remain key barriers to effective climate-policy implementation.

In addition, the relevant data usually is owned by China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which does not always share it with other agencies. Local agencies can’t always access detailed data.

When I visited Xiamen, officials told me the local government is now improving emissions monitoring systems. But there should be more systematic and rigorous data collection, covering both carbon emissions and non-CO2 greenhouse gases. Also, much of the company-level data is self-reported, which could affect the accuracy of carbon-emissions statistics.

For continued climate action, it’s also important that the central government ensures that local officials have the institutional support needed to experiment and propose new ideas.

…China will always need local officials willing to introduce new legislations or try new policy instruments – like Shenzhen with its ETS, or establishing new carbon-monitoring platforms.

For that, it needs entrepreneurial bureaucrats who are willing to turn ideas into actions. Ensuring that local governments have the right set of conditions to do this is very important.

CB: What did you find most surprising when researching this book?

WG: That international collaboration is still very important. I found that many officials learnt about climate change through international engagement.

In the current situation, I think international engagement is still very important – particularly given how, even with how geopolitics is really complicating things, many cities continue to have common challenges. For example, collaboration between Shanghai and Los Angeles on green shipping corridors is still ongoing.

That can bring opportunities for continuing climate action at the city level in the face of rising international tensions, as long as national governments give them space to be involved in international climate action.

Another surprise was the factors of what exactly made climate action durable. I was really surprised that many of the cities that I revisited were still involved in the pilot programmes, despite the central government restructuring that shifted the climate change portfolio from the NDRC to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment – which created challenges for the local governments who had to navigate this.

I also thought that the change in mayors for all four cities would lead to climate initiatives falling off the agenda.

But actually, Zhenjiang, Xiamen and Nanchang all maintained their low-carbon initiatives, despite these changes. This showed it isn’t only strong mayors that bring success, but rather a group of trained personnel building and enforcing regulations and standards. So the importance of bureaucrats and bureaucracy in making climate action durable was actually way beyond my initial expectations.

I was also surprised that bureaucrats can be entrepreneurial, even though they work in a centralised system. They are creative, they know how to convince their boss about the importance of climate action and they know how that can bring opportunities for themselves and their boss. And because of how long they have worked in one area, they understand the local politics, policy processes and the coalitions needed to provide solutions.

The post Interview: How ‘mid-level bureaucrats’ are helping to shape Chinese climate policy appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Interview: How ‘mid-level bureaucrats’ are helping to shape Chinese climate policy

Climate Change

Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming

Published

8 hours ago

June 10, 2026

Alice Rush

The planet is heating up more quickly than ever before.

For decades, greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity have been building up in the atmosphere and trapping ever-higher levels of heat.

The resulting asymmetry between incoming solar energy and energy radiated back out into space – known as “Earth’s energy imbalance” – provides a direct measure of the extent to which humans are disrupting the Earth’s climate system.

This imbalance is growing and in 2025 its 10-year average reached a record high, indicating that global temperatures could increase at even higher rates in the future.

This is among the headline findings of the latest “indicators of global climate change” (IGCC) report, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, which tracks changes in the climate system on an annual basis.

The report, now in its fourth iteration, has been produced by dozens of scientists from around the world.

Its findings are designed to fill the gap between Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science reports, which are published every 5-7 years.

In this article, we unpack the IGCC report, which explores how human activity is driving a growing energy imbalance and why monitoring systems to track global climate are so crucial.

(For more on previous IGCC reports, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2023, 2024 and 2025.)

Greenhouse gas emissions remain at an all-time high

Global greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to increase, mostly as a result of the use of fossil fuels. However, deforestation, agriculture and industrial processes also play an important role.

Glossary

CO₂ equivalent: Greenhouse gases can be expressed in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent, or CO2e. For a given amount, different greenhouse gases trap different amounts of heat in the atmosphere, a quantity known as… Read More

Over the most recent decade (2015-24), emissions stood at the equivalent of 54.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) per year. In 2024, the most recent year for which we have complete data, emissions reached 56.8GtCO2e.

As the chart below shows, these emissions have pushed up atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. In 2025, concentrations of these gases reached 425.6 parts per million (ppm), 1936.3 parts per billion (ppb) and 339.4ppb, respectively.

This represents a rise of 3.8%, 3.8% and 2.2%, respectively, since the 2019 levels reported in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (yellow), methane (blue) and nitrous oxide (green) over 2000-25. The grey-shaded region represents continuing changes since AR6. Note the different vertical scales for each gas. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

At the same time, declines in emissions of aerosols such as sulphur dioxide, partly as a result of efforts to tackle air pollution, are increasing the Earth’s energy imbalance. This is because aerosols have a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate, counteracting warming from CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.

(Tackling sulphur dioxide, alongside other particulate emissions, remains critical because the immediate health and environmental damage they cause far outweighs their short-term cooling effect on the climate.)

The Earth’s energy imbalance is rising rapidly

The Earth’s energy imbalance has long been recognised as a key indicator of how the climate is being affected by human activities.

However, it is only in the last few decades that scientists have been able to record temperature changes deep enough in the ocean to accurately quantify it.

Earth’s energy imbalance measures how quickly excess heat is accumulating in every part of the Earth system, primarily in the ocean, but also in land, ice and atmosphere.

Through this accumulation of heat, the energy imbalance influences the rate of sea level rise and ice melt across the world, as well as increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods and droughts.

Without human influence, the Earth’s energy imbalance would be close to zero.

But, as greenhouse gas emissions have built up in the atmosphere, the imbalance has been growing since the 1970s. Recent increases to Earth’s energy imbalance have outpaced those projections made by climate models — indicating the planet could see more warming than expected in the future.

As the right-hand chart below shows, the imbalance is now at a record high, having more than doubled over the past two decades.

It has increased by around 40% since 2019, from an average 0.79 watts per square metre (Wm2) over 2006-18, according to IPCC AR6, to 1.12Wm2 over 2013-25.

The left-hand chart shows how heat is accumulating in the ocean (blues), ice (grey), land (orange) and atmosphere (purple).

Left: Observed changes in the Earth heat inventory for the period 1971-2020. Right: Estimates of the Earth energy imbalance for successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most recent decade (right). Shaded regions indicate the very likely range (90-100 % probability), while the stars show the CERES (NASA Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) estimates for comparison. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

Global temperature rise

The excess heat building up in the climate system from the energy imbalance is pushing up global temperatures at a record rate of 0.27C per decade.

We estimate that human-induced warming – the amount of observed global surface

temperature increase attributable to both the direct and indirect effects of human activities – reached 1.37C in 2025. This has risen from 1.0C in 2017, as reported in IPCC AR6.

While natural variability in the climate system – such as El Niño or La Niña events – can also influence temperatures year-to-year, the upward temperature trend we are seeing is being driven by the persistent imbalance in energy.

We now expect global temperatures to exceed the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels around the year 2030.

This is significant because 1.5C has been identified as the critical dividing line between manageable climate risks and catastrophic, potentially irreversible damage to global ecosystems and human societies.

Heat accumulating throughout the Earth system

While heat is accumulating throughout the Earth system, it is not being distributed evenly around the globe.

Since the 1970s, around 90% of this heat has been taken up by the ocean, affecting marine ecosystems, ocean circulation patterns, sea level rise and climate extremes.

For example, the number of marine heatwave days – periods of unusually high sea surface temperatures – has more than tripled globally since the early 1990s. The year 2025 alone saw 65 days of marine heatwaves – meaning they occurred, on average, more than one day a week.

Meanwhile, the cryosphere – the portion of the Earth made up of frozen water, including glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost – is experiencing widespread ice loss and thawing in response to the growing energy imbalance. This affects ecosystems, sea level rise and infrastructure in polar and high-latitude regions.

Rapid warming has also resulted in record extreme temperatures over land, with average maximum temperatures for any single day over 2016-25 around 1.92C above pre-industrial levels). This is an increase of almost half a degree compared to the previous decade (2006-15).

Sea level rise and the energy imbalance

Sea level rise provides one of the clearest long-term signals of a changing planet.

It is closely linked to Earth’s energy imbalance. As heat accumulates in the ocean, water expands, raising sea levels. Meanwhile, a warming land and atmosphere means addition of water to the oceans through melting of glaciers and ice sheets, also adding to sea level rise.

Over the long-term, sea levels have been rising, on average, at a rate of around 1.8mm per year since 1901, totalling a record 23cm in 2025. This is increasing the risk of coastal flooding, erosion and habitat loss in many low-lying areas around the world.

This rise can be seen in the left-hand chart below, which shows observed global sea level changes from tide gauges (grey and blue dashed lines) and satellites (red dashed lines) since 1901. The solid lines indicate the average across multiple datasets.

Sea level rise is accelerating consistent with the observed increase in Earth’s energy imbalance. Over 2006-25, sea levels have risen at a rate of 3.67mm per year – more than double the rate of 1.69mm per year seen over 1976-95.

This increasing rate is shown in the right-hand figure below, which shows four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade.

(Last year’s transition from El Niño to weak La Niña conditions affected global rainfall patterns and led to a small and temporary fall in global average sea level in 2025. This explains the slight decrease in rate of sea level rise for the most recent decade, which is affected more than the 20-year period 2006-25.)

Left: Global average sea level rise over 1901-2025, relative to a 1995-2014 baseline. Individual timeseries are shown with dashed lines, while the black solid line shows the average (from tide gauges and satellites) used in AR6 and the solid red line shows the 1993-2025 average from satellites. Right: Global mean sea-level rates (in mm per year) for four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade. The shading indicates the very likely range. Credit: Forster et al. (2026)

The bigger picture

Despite greenhouse gas emissions not increasing as rapidly as in the 2000s, this year’s IGCC findings continue to show how far and how fast the climate is changing due to human activity.

A significant increase in decarbonisation efforts in the second half of this decade is required to slow down the rate of human-caused warming and limit the escalation of climate risks and impacts.

These findings, like many others produced by scientists across the globe, rely on international expertise, partnership and the maintenance and availability of global climate datasets and the global observing programmes that underpin them.

This year’s edition of IGCC used more than 40 global datasets produced by research teams around the world, including the NASA satellite record of the Earth’s energy imbalance and the ARGO deep ocean float network.

However, a number of long-term monitoring programmes could be threatened by funding decisions made by governments around the world, most notably the Trump administration in the US.

Local meteorological data and weather balloon measurement programmes in many countries have declined in recent years, especially in Africa, the west Pacific and South America. This reduces scientists’ ability to monitor and understand key indicators of climate change.

This is not just an issue for climate science. Many of these observations are key to weather forecasts and systems that provide early warning for extreme weather. For example, media reports have suggested that recent reductions in weather balloon measurements in Alaska led to a lack of warnings for a recent winter storm.

The continuity and integrity of the climate observations that scientists use to understand how the climate is changing depends on effective and sustained coordination by international organisations, such as the Global Climate Observing System, the World Meteorological Organization and World Climate Research Programme.

Without this data and its coordination, future assessments will be much more difficult at a time when urgent climate action is needed.