The many climate and energy pieces of China’s 12th Five Year Plan appear to be moving into place. Most recently, Chinese Climate Change Minister Xie Zhenhua announced that China was about to come out with a full plan for the 17% carbon emissions reduction target in the Plan (2011-2015). In March, China announced an initial set of initiatives to control the growth in carbon emissions, and the 17% figure is part of the larger goal or reducing emissions by 40-45% by 2020.
Africa is already a climate-extreme continent. You already have extremes of rainfall and of drought naturally. The fact we’re actually seeing changes in that pattern…more frequency in terms of droughts and floods …begs the question, is it climate change?
Chinese officials say extreme weather caused by climate change is to blame. This year, rainfall levels along the river have declined by up to 50 percent compared with previous years. Meanwhile, the river has been losing its ability to provide relief when rainfall is low since it has fallen victim to man-made development…
Ten years in technology is a lifetime, and the past decade for clean technology has seen a rebirth and maturing of both the efficiency of technologies as well as the amounts invested in them…
After nearly a millennium of efforts to control floods in the Yangtze River (China) basin with dikes, polders and other hard engineering measures, the Chinese government adopted a radically different approach after the disastrous 1998 floods. A soft path approach was used that saw several thousand square kilometers of floodplains restored to safely hold and slowly release peak floodwaters.
Restoring the floodplains was a ‘no regrets’ adaptation that is robust in managing climatic variability and change, and has extensive environmental and socio-economic co-benefits.
The UN secretary general will redirect efforts to making more immediate gains in clean energy and sustainable development.
2011 will be a big year for climate and energy policy development in China, so we thought we’d highlight some of the key China energy and climate-related stories to watch out for during the course of the year. We’ve known to expect major developments now for over a year, since China’s commitments made at the Copenhagen climate talks in late 2009 were scheduled to be implemented in the 2011 12th Five Year Plan.
THE room spoke just after the sun set. Patricia Espinosa, the foreign secretary of Mexico and the president of the UN climate conference, presented drafts of the conference’s two final texts, which had been circulating for a couple of hours, just before six o’clock on Friday December 10th. The assembled negotiators and ministers clapped. And, in a prolonged surge of relief, they kept clapping. The room rose to its feet, and clapped some more.
They were not just praising the documents, and the impressive diplomatic efforts of Ms Espinosa and her team. They were clapping the fact that they were clapping, because they knew what the clapping meant. Something about their common response confirmed the feeling that had been gaining ground: the documents might actually get adopted, and the wounds inflicted on the UN process in the bruising breakdown at Copenhagen in 2009 might be healed. The room applauded yet more. For the rest of the long night, the voice of the cheering room was as important a factor in the talks as any national delegation or inspired diplomatic finesse.
How does the new agreement on REDD set the stage for halting the destruction and degradation of forests?
After almost three years of difficult negotiations, parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have agreed to slow, halt, and reverse forest loss and the related emissions in developing countries (REDD+). However, there is still much work to do before parties to the UNFCCC can recognize potential REDD+ countries’ actions. The Cancun Agreements provide important guidance for all actors – countries, NGOs, multilateral institutions – who are helping countries prepare for REDD+ in the “fast-start” period through 2012. However, their actions will remain outside of (though now guided by) the UNFCCC, until discussions about appropriate methods for tracking and financing national mitigation actions are completed.
The official communiqué from the Cancún climate-change conference cannot disguise the fact that there will be no successor to the Kyoto Protocol when it expires at the end of 2012. Japan, among others, has withdrawn its support for efforts simply to extend the Kyoto treaty.
This sounds like bad news, because it means that there will be no international price on carbon, and, without a market price, it is difficult to see how the reduction of carbon emissions can be efficiently organized. But appearances can be deceiving.
Even as the top-down approach to tackling climate change is breaking down, a new bottom-up approach is emerging. It holds out better prospects for success than the cumbersome United Nations negotiations.
