President Xi Jinping has committed China to producing a comprehensive emissions reduction plan, covering for the first time all economic sectors and greenhouse gases, under the UN climate process.
In a speech widely seen as reaffirming the commitment of the world’s biggest polluter to global climate action, Xi said on Wednesday that “no matter how the international situation changes, China will not slow down its efforts to address climate change”.
Speaking at a virtual meeting of global leaders organised by the United Nations and Brazil, Xi announced that China would set new goals to cut emissions by 2035 “covering the entire economy, including all greenhouse gases” ahead of the COP30 summit in November, according to a text published by China’s state news agency.
China’s current target for 2030 – included in its latest Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) released four years ago – only covers carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by the energy sector.
Push for stronger targets
Tackling emissions of all greenhouses gases, beyond CO2, across the whole of the economy is seen as crucial in limiting global warming in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Through its coal mining and farming sectors, for example, China is the world’s largest emitter of methane, which has a shorter lifespan but is much more potent than CO2.
Addressing the media after Wednesday’s summit, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Xi’s pronouncement on the upcoming Chinese NDC was “extremely important for climate action”.
After most nations missed an initial February deadline to submit their new NDCs, Brazil’s COP30 presidency – which is organising this year’s UN climate summit in November – and UN officials are encouraging countries to produce updated targets by September.
At Wednesday’s meeting, which saw the participation of 17 leaders, Brazil urged larger economies, including the European Union and China, to commit to cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep global warming “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, as promised in the Paris Agreement, according to Reuters.
Scientists say the planet is already getting perilously close to heating up by 1.5C above pre-industrial times, which is the lower temperature limit governments agreed to aim for in the Paris pact.
Uncertainty over China’s ambition
While close observers of China’s climate policy welcomed Xi’s comments, they cautioned against assuming that the nation’s emission-cutting plans will be automatically ambitious.
Yao Zhe, global policy advisor at Greenpeace East Asia, told Climate Home that “a strong NDC from China is not yet guaranteed”.
She added that, while discussions being elevated to the highest political level is “a big step forward”, the level of ambition “remains an open question”, especially given the ongoing tariff war with the United States.
Currently, China – which alone accounts for a third of global emissions – has a goal of peaking CO2 emissions “before 2030” and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060.
Since 2020, the country has also pledged to reduce CO2 emissions per unit of GDP – a measure known as carbon intensity – by more than 65% below 2005 levels by 2030.
China is far off track to meet that intensity target under the combined effect of slower economic growth and a faster rise in CO2 emissions, Lauri Myllyvirta, senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, wrote in an analysis for Dialogue Earth.
“It’s shameful”: Amazon Indigenous people call for oil drilling ban at COP30
He told Climate Home that Xi’s statement this week did not answer questions over whether China would put forward an absolute emissions reduction target encompassing everything – or different types of targets for the various sectors and gases.
“Coverage isn’t everything,” he said. “It would be better to have an ambitious target for the main CO2-emitting sectors than to have a weak target covering everything.”
Xi’s dig at Trump policy
But the real significance lies in the level of political buy-in. “The more Xi is personally involved and associated with the targets, the less the government can afford the targets to be disappointing or weak,” said Myllyvirta.
In his speech at the UN meeting, Xi also called on countries to support multilateral climate action and deepen international cooperation to enable the free flow of green technologies, in a thinly veiled attack on US policies under President Donald Trump.
Q&A: China set to stay the course on green policies, despite Trump
His administration has begun the process of withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement and has slapped tariffs of up to 3,521% on solar panels from key producing countries across Asia.
“The green transition is the only way to deal with climate change, and a new engine for economic and social development,” said Xi on Wednesday.
The post Xi commits China to full climate plan but emissions-cutting ambition still unclear appeared first on Climate Home News.
Xi commits China to full climate plan but emissions-cutting ambition still unclear
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
related
Analysis: Lula presidency saved at least 20,000km2 of Brazilian Amazon since 2022
Why land-use emissions have fallen by a third this century – in six charts
Analysis: 84% of nations miss deadline to identify ‘nature-harming’ subsidies by 2025
UK withdraws millions in funding from world’s second-largest rainforest in Congo
The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.