China’s conservative climate targets a missed opportunity for leadership: Analysts

BEIJING - China’s conservative targets for its latest national climate plan, announced by President Xi Jinping on Sept 24, are a missed opportunity for the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases to show stronger climate leadership, said observers.

Mr Xi told a United Nations meeting on climate action

in New York via a video statement that China will, by 2035, reduce net emissions by 7 per cent to 10 per cent from peak levels, while “striving to do better”.

This was the first time that China had set out a concrete emissions reduction target.

But it falls short of the 30 per cent reduction for China that studies say is required to limit global warming to 1.5 deg C, which is a key goal of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement that mandates countries to submit their own national plans every five years to reflect their ambition.

Mr Xi also pledged that China will increase the share of non-fossil fuels in total energy consumption to more than 30 per cent – an increase of around 10 percentage points – as well as “make new-energy vehicles the mainstream in the sales of new vehicles”. Such targets are considered achievable based on current trends.

China’s proportion of non-fossil energy consumption increased from 15.9 per cent in 2020 to 19.8 per cent in 2024, and the country has installed renewable energy capacity at breakneck speed.

Of the 16.8 million car sales in China from January to August, 8.7 million are powered by petrol, comprising about 52 per cent.

However, “(the) targets reflect constrained ambition – China has opted for promising no more than it is confident it can deliver”, said Ms Kate Logan and Mr Li Shuo from the US-based Asia Society Policy Institute in an analysis published on Sept 24.

“Unfortunately, they are not ambitious enough to meet the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals or to galvanise the international community to accelerate climate progress.”

These plans are called the nationally determined contributions, or NDC. China’s commitments are closely watched because its plan significantly contributes to whether global targets can be met.

China’s last major commitment was in 2020, when Mr Xi announced at the UN General Assembly that China would strive to achieve carbon dioxide peaking before 2030, and carbon neutrality before 2060. Then, the “dual-carbon” targets were seen as China taking a global leadership position and going beyond existing domestic policy. 

In choosing not to set more ambitious targets this time, China could have taken a cue from what other countries are doing, Mr Li told The Straits Times. “Its major counterparts, the US and the EU, are distracted, giving Beijing both an easy excuse to avoid strong action and a diminishing sense of collective will.”

The US is the second-largest emitter after China, but President Donald Trump has said that the US will pull out of the Paris Agreement, and is not expected to set new climate goals in 2025. European governments have reportedly struggled to find the consensus required to agree on the EU’s NDC.

Analysts pointed to other factors that could have constrained China’s publicly articulated climate ambitions, such as the Russia-Ukraine war and ongoing trade tensions that have made the external environment more uncertain. China also experienced severe power shortages in 2021 that affected 20 provinces, which have reinforced the importance of coal to the country’s energy security.

Ms Yao Zhe, a Beijing-based global policy adviser at Greenpeace East Asia, said: “Even for those with tempered expectations, what’s presented today still falls short.

“This 2035 target offers little assurance to keep our planet safe, but what’s hopeful is that the actual decarbonisation of China’s economy is likely to exceed its target on paper.”

She added that with the amount of wind and solar entering China’s energy mix, there is reason to believe that China’s economy will continue to decarbonise.

Mr Lauri Myllyvirta from the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air said on social media platform X that the target for solar and wind capacity of 3,600 gigawatts (GW) by 2035 would mean a sharp slowdown of current trends.

Meeting the target requires less than 200GW of solar and wind power per year, compared with the 360GW added in 2024 alone, he noted. Others have pointed out that China invested US$625 billion (S$805 billion) in clean energy in 2024, which is 31 per cent of the world’s total.

Mr Myllyvirta added: “My reading is that this is a set of targets prepared by a conservative bureaucracy that Xi did not choose to override this time. It should be seen as a floor, not a ceiling, for China’s ambition.”