It could be a watershed year for China’s climate change fight. Public participation is crucial

The world’s biggest polluter will have to set climate targets for 2035 soon
Notorious smog problems have returned as the addiction to coal worsens

Shi Jiangtao

Published: 3:30pm, 19 Mar 2024

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This is likely to be a watershed year in China’s fight against climate change and other environmental woes.

Beijing will have to set its climate targets for 2035 soon – by 2025 – as is required under the Paris Agreement.

In doing so, the world’s largest polluter will have to address concerns about how it plans to achieve its goals of limiting coal consumption growth by 2025 and reaching peak carbon emissions before 2030.

There is much at stake, yet it does not seem to be going well.

China’s notorious smog problems – which seemed to be largely under control in the past decade – returned last year as the country’s addiction to dirty coal got worse.

In 2023, most of the big cities, including Beijing and Hong Kong, recorded increased levels of the microscopic airborne particles known as PM2.5 – one of the top five factors limiting life expectancy in China.

China accounts for around 55 per cent of global coal consumption. Photo: AP

Air pollution worsened across the country last year, with most mainland cities failing to meet the national standard for PM2.5, the government-linked China Clean Air Policy Partnership said in a February report.

It was the first time China’s annual average concentration of the pollutant has rebounded since 2013, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) in Finland.

While China has made some headway over the years, its air quality remains among the worst in the world, with the annual average levels of PM2.5 about five to six times above the World Health Organization guidelines.

The surge in air pollution was mainly attributed to a coal-heavy industrial recovery and expansion of coal-fired power, along with extreme weather events such as droughts and sandstorms.

China added six times more coal power capacity than the rest of the world combined in 2022, and last year sped up construction of new plants, according to another report by CREA and the Global Energy Monitor.

China will miss its climate goals unless it reins in coal power: report

That is despite President Xi Jinping’s pledge in 2021 to “strictly control coal-fired power generation projects”. Instead, coal consumption has gone up considerably, along with energy demand and carbon emissions, while GDP growth continues to slow.

The report warns that China – which accounts for some 55 per cent of global coal consumption and has the most coal-fired power plants in the world – is “badly off track” to meet several climate targets for 2025.

More worryingly, Beijing appears to have pulled back a key carbon emissions goal. Premier Li Qiang told the annual legislative meeting this month that energy intensity – the amount of energy consumed per unit of GDP – would be cut by 2.5 per cent this year. That is far from enough to meet the current 2025 goal of reducing energy intensity by 13.5 per cent.

This again exposes the limits of China’s top-down campaign against pollution, as the economic recovery takes priority.

China bans new steel plants in ‘blue skies’ plan to cut pollution

A study by the University of Chicago two years ago showed the Chinese public can play a significant role in helping authorities deal with industrial and other pollution problems. Volunteers recruited nationwide were asked to file complaints to local governments about pollution emissions and other violations, mostly via hotlines and social media platforms like Weibo.

The study findings offered “experimental evidence in relation to bottom-up participation in environmental governance by Chinese citizens”, Shaoda Wang, one of the researchers, told China Dialogue.

This is particularly valuable given Beijing’s resistance to greater public participation, which makes its pollution targets increasingly untenable. But despite the tightening political control, censorship and clampdowns against NGOs, the public still has incentives to get involved.

And as this study and other research shows, the government actually needs public support and oversight to tackle environmental problems.

The world cannot afford for China to fail on its carbon and pollution emissions targets and coal reduction goals. And if Beijing is to balance this with economic growth it will need to find ways to re-enlist the public.

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