23 September 2020

Experts react to President Xi’s statement that China will up its climate ambition by striving for carbon neutrality by 2060

In a virtual address to the 75th UN General Assembly on 22 September, Chinese President Xi Jinping said China would deliver a stronger emissions reduction target, peak emissions before 2030 and strive to reach carbon neutrality before 2060.

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Judith Shapiro

Co-author with Yifei Li, China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet

The commitment to carbon reduction should help China achieve a double win and help to reduce the ground-level air pollution that so threatens public health.

That said, China’s commitments to ecological civilization and other “going green” initiatives must be implemented in such a way that they do not mask other state goals such as the collection of data about individuals and the administrative reordering and relocations of border area populations. The use of target-setting, crackdowns and behaviour modification campaigns can fail to garner public support and doom these initiatives in the long run.

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Ranping Song

Developing Country Climate Action Manager, World Resources Institute (WRI)

[...] [S]uch policies can achieve positive financial benefits as early as 2023, even before factoring in social benefits such as health impacts.

Realising carbon neutrality would save as many as 1.8 million people from premature death in the year 2050 alone. After incorporating the health benefits, China would create a net benefit of US$11 trillion before 2050 when compared with current policies, at a discount rate of 8%. Similarly, Cambridge Econometrics finds that China can raise its GDP by as much as 5% later this decade by implementing the new pledge.

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