If you are concerned about climate change, China's 13th five-year plan -- unveiled on March 17 at the conclusion of the annual meeting of the National People's Congress in Beijing -- is arguably the world's most important policy document.
China's size and its status as the world's largest carbon polluter by volume means the new plan will be crucial in determining future emissions trends. The country's economic weight means it will be critical to unlocking the innovation needed to make the shift away from fossil fuels. So what is in the latest plan -- and what might it mean?
The economic guidelines for 2016 to 2020 that came out of the NPC's so-called "twin meetings" -- which effectively serve to rubber-stamp policies -- list only 13 binding targets, of which 10 relate to the environment and resources.
Alongside the headline growth rate target of 6.5%, the plan sees China committing to an 18% reduction in carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product from 2015 levels by 2020, and to a 15% reduction in energy consumed per unit of GDP from 2015 levels by 2020.
It sets targets to generate 15% of primary energy from non-fossil sources and to keep energy consumption below 5 billion tons of standard coal equivalent by 2020, China's first pledge of this kind. It also commits China to a 25% reduction in harmful PM2.5 particulates (a measure of air pollution), underlining how smog, and public concern about it, has become a major issue.
These are ambitious pledges, and that should not be a surprise. At the Paris climate talks in late 2015 -- at which all the world's countries agreed to limit global average temperature rises to 2 C above pre-industrial levels -- it became clear that China, once the laggard of the talks, was no longer an obstacle to progress.
Before the Paris negotiations, China indicated that it would reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 40% to 45% by 2020, compared with 2005 levels, and reach a peak in its emissions before 2030. Many analysts now expect China to overdeliver: a recent study by Nicholas Stern and Fergus Green of the London School of Economics concluded that greenhouse-gas emissions in China may have already peaked.
It is unlikely that such a global deal could have been reached without remarkable recent cost reductions in renewable energy, underpinned by economies of scale in Chinese manufacturing and deployment, as the country shifts away from coal-fired power generation.
Coal consumption declined last year for the second year running -- as did coal production and thermal power generation. The country's wind power capacity has overtaken Europe, totaling 145.1 gigawatts, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, surpassing the European Union's 141.6GW output. Solar generation too has seen drastic growth in China: up by 175% in 2014, according to a recent study by the scholars John A. Mathews and Hao Tan.
Leading the pack
In shifting to a more sustainable development model, it is clear that China intends to lead the pack on the technologies needed for a carbon-constrained world.
Yet this is not the end of the story. From here, ministries and other elite institutions will draw up plans that flesh out the 13th five-year plan for sectoral implementation. That implementation of low-carbon regulations -- particularly as legacy industries and powerful vested interests grapple over the plan's implications -- could still benefit from greater attention.
Despite being the world's most populous country, with an enormous environmental footprint, China has a remarkably weak environmental bureaucracy. Its Ministry of Environmental Protection is not only under-resourced, but its local departments, the Environmental Protection Bureaus, report to local governments, rather than the central ministry. This has led to conflicts of interest that ensure the ministry has little enforcement bite.
Significantly, Chen Jining -- the ministry's well-regarded new chief, a scientist by training, and a political outsider -- used his press conference at the twin meetings to announce a new focus on enforcement, in particular through a trial "vertical management" system that aims to overcome the structural hurdles by making 17 EPBs report directly to the ministry.
Such initiatives will require accountability and transparency if they are to be effective. This is enshrined in Chinese legislation, such as a new Environmental Protection Law that should help non-governmental organizations to take polluters to court, but could be threatened by draconian moves aimed at media and civil society organizations.
China's controversial draft law on foreign NGOs, intensified Internet censorship and an emphasis on ideological conformity among media outlets -- as one recent slogan put it, "the media's surname is 'Party'," -- suggest that the government risks undermining the social force it needs most: active citizens who can act as an early warning system for environmental malfeasance and provide effective supervision of climate regulations.
As the energy transition unfolds, it is China's people, as much as its government, who will help to determine the safety of the global climate. Not only are citizens a vital part of ensuring effective enforcement of regulations, but there are also many examples of local-level dynamism in green technology and business models in China that are often overlooked by an emphasis on state-led, top-down initiatives.
China has the world's largest installed capacity of solar water heaters, for example, mostly in poor and rural areas. These are indigenous Chinese designs that lower emissions without the need for grid integration, but have not benefited from state support or been factored into central planning. Electric bicycles offer another example of an enormous, unsubsidized success: what scholars have called "disruptive innovation."
It was China's green movement that first challenged the extractive, carbon-intensive development model the government has now tried to interrupt, and it is local dynamism that is helping to drive path-breaking innovation for sustainability. China's planners may need to think about the public's role if they are truly to realize the potentially transformative effects of this newest blueprint.
Sam Geall is a research fellow at the University of Sussex and executive editor of chinadialogue.net.
