While China`s long-term goal may not cover greenhouse gases without carbon dioxide, the country must also address these gases; Current non-carbon dioxide emissions in China have a greater impact on warming than all greenhouse gases from Japan or Brazil. Implementation of measures to combat these gases as part of the 2030 climate commitment could facilitate their final integration into China`s long-term vision. In 2014, Xi and Barack Obama, then president of the United States, have already reached a surprising agreement on climate change, which has become an important part of the Paris agreement signed in December 2015. The paper examines whether China`s actions to combat climate change are sufficient to enable China to increase its emissions by 2030 and increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to 20% by 2030. These are two of the objectives contained in China`s National Contribution (NDC) presented in June 2015 to the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) under the Paris Agreement. To the extent that current and future climate change policy will not be enough to achieve China`s NDC under the Paris Agreement, we want to fill the political gaps that need to be filled to enable China to meet its commitments. We identify two types of political gaps. The first is the gap between current climate policy and the combination of current and additional strategies that would be needed to achieve China`s NDC goals. The second is the discrepancy between how policies have been developed and how they are implemented.
Through this research, we are trying to clarify which existing climate policy has been most effective in limiting emissions in China and how they interact with each other. We present a mixed method of assessing policy gaps that we define at the beginning of the document. We offer a reproducible methodology for each country trying to identify its climate policy gaps. Specialized surveys and a systemic dynamics model are used to examine the first type of political vacuum, in which the absence of specific policies leads to a mismatch between the current political package and the political package needed by a country to achieve its NDC objectives. The Committee of Experts is also working to identify the second type of political gap in which poor design or implementation of existing policies in practice prevents a country from achieving its NDC objectives. The dynamic modeling tool of the system has already been developed for other countries and is designed for simple adaptation. The extension of the mixed method used in this paper would involve analysing the likely effects of new future policies when countries begin to formulate their future goals and strategies by the middle of the century. Amy Davidson, Executive Director of North America at the international non-profit Climate Group, said: „The important announcement made by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the UN General Assembly and in the midst of NYC Climate Week is welcome. China has raised its climate ambitions just a week after the EU`s proposal to increase its own 2030 target. Despite the absence of a U.S. federal government, this year at Climate Week NYC, we see countries, businesses, states and cities encouraging each other to set more ambitious emissions targets.
Today, an analysis has shown that China`s emissions could peak at 13 to 16 gigatonnes of CO2 between 2021 and 2025, what researchers call a „major contribution“ to achieving the Paris agreement`s goal of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. The official goal is to peak at „2030.“ Both the expert survey and the modelling results show that energy sector reform, industrial processing, industrial efficiency, ETS, light commercial vehicle (LDV) efficiency and the efficiency of heavy commercial vehicles (HDVs), woodworking and d