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Data Transparency: New Dynamic at COP-21 in Paris

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Angel Hsu, Andrew Moffat and Kaiyang Xu

From the Paris Climate Negotiations

COP-21 provided key insights into China’s evolving view on emissions MRV as national leaders committed to continue building monitoring systems and implementing verification protocols, including third-party verification, particularly for its seven regional pilot emissions trading schemes (ETS) and planned national program. In COP-21’s second week, the Chinese delegation hosted a “China MRV System” side event that brought together academics, government officials and policy experts to discuss China’s capacity to monitor and verify carbon emissions.

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Press Call on China's Climate Action and the 13th Five Year Plan

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Geoffrey Henderson

China’s 13th Five Year Plan, to be released in the coming days, will provide a blueprint for the country’s economic, social, and environmental development through 2020. More specific plans for energy and other sectors are expected following the main plan’s release. The plan comes in the context of China’s increasing climate action in recent years, with three key trends emerging: China is making progress in rebalancing its economy away from heavy industry toward services, limiting coal use, and expanding its use of non-fossil energy.

To discuss these trends and provide an overview of the Five Year Plan process, ChinaFAQs hosted a press teleconference on March 4th.

For the audio of the press call, click here.

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In China and Beyond, Action Plans Provide a Path for Improving Building Efficiency

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Sifan Liu

This post originally appeared on TheCityFix.

Unique to China, Five-Year Plans (FYPs) are blueprints that central, state and local governments draft and implement to guide social and economic development. Since 1995, the national government has focused on energy efficiency in buildings in its FYPs, and sub-national governments have followed suit since 2000. Since then, many cities have released Building Energy Efficiency action plans as a sub-component of their FYPs. In fact, incorporating building energy efficiency action plans into FYPs is already a growing trend among many cities across China.

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5 Questions: What Does China’s New Five-Year Plan Mean for Climate Action?

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Geoffrey Henderson, Ranping Song and Paul Joffe

This post originally appeared on WRI’s Insights blog:

China has officially unveiled its 13th Five-Year Plan, which will guide the country’s economic and social development from 2016 through 2020. This latest edition builds on progress made over the last five years, and makes clear that environmental stewardship is an increasingly integral component of China’s development.

The plan lays out targets and measures to address several sustainability challenges—including climate change, air pollution, water, urbanization, transportation and more. The new plan’s high-level targets and policies will continue to strengthen China’s efforts to shift to a more sustainable model of growth and deliver on its climate commitments. Here’s a look at the highlights and importance of the plan for China’s action on energy and climate change.

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China’s Low-Carbon Strategy: Could a Carbon Tax Play a Role?

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Carla Freeman and Bo Li

As reflected in the emphasis on “green development” of the recently-released 13th Five Year Plan, China’s leaders recognize the need to shift to a more sustainable, climate-friendly model of development. They have signaled that they believe market pricing is a key element of the new model, and that carbon pricing is an important policy instrument for achieving this shift. While China’s carbon trading pilots and planned national trading system have received much attention, a carbon tax is also being seriously discussed. Government think tanks have proposed various options for the sectors to be covered, tax administration, and use of the revenue to complement existing policies.

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China’s Thirteenth Five-Year Plan Paves the Way for a CO2 Emissions Peak

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Valerie J. Karplus

Based on recent economic developments and the newly-released Thirteenth Five-Year Plan, China is well on its way to reaching its climate goal of peak CO2 emissions by 2030.

The Plan charts the overarching course of China’s economic and social development through 2020, and will be translated into plans for provinces and specific sectors like energy in the coming months and years. The national plan, by reflecting the government’s high-level priorities, provides important momentum toward meeting China’s climate change commitments.

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Press Call Analyzing China's 13th Five Year Plan

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Geoffrey Henderson

China recently released its 13th Five Year Plan, which will guide China’s economic, social, and environmental policy through 2020. The plan makes clear that China is integrating climate action into its strategy for economic development. It sets China on course to meet or exceed its international climate commitments, and lays out a strategy for a rebalancing of the economy toward cleaner drivers of growth.

To analyze the key elements of the Five Year Plan in the context of the progress China has achieved and the country’s remaining challenges, ChinaFAQs organized a press conference call on March 18th.

For the audio of the press call, click here.

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How China's 13th Five-Year Plan Addresses Energy and the Environment

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Deborah Seligsohn and Angel Hsu

This post originally appeared on ChinaFile.

For the first time ever, a senior Chinese leader announced in his work report to the National People’s Congress—his most important formal speech of the year—that environmental violators and those who fail to report such violations will be “severely punished.” Premier Li Keqiang reported that China had succeeded in meeting or exceeding the previous Five-Year Plan’s environmental goals. The draft 13th Five-Year Plan, released March 5 and scheduled to be passed (likely without amendment) in the coming days, builds on that success, requiring greater reductions in the emissions of many pollutants.

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U.S. and China To Sign, Join Paris Agreement This Year, Deepen Cooperation on Climate and Clean Energy

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Geoffrey Henderson

The United States and China have issued a joint presidential statement confirming that they will each sign the Paris Agreement on April 22nd and take steps to join the agreement as early as possible this year, and calling on other countries to do the same. This statement builds on the action generated by the presidential joint statements over the last two years, which has been an important catalyst of international action on climate change. The new showing of mutual confidence and continued commitment will contribute to worldwide momentum to tackle climate change and implement the Paris Agreement.

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China Signs Paris Agreement, Will Encourage Others to Join

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World Resources Institute

This post originally appeared on the World Resources Institute’s live blog covering the Signing Ceremony of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. To follow the signing ceremony via WRI’s live blog, click here.

The signing of the landmark international climate change agreement reached in Paris in December is taking place today at the United Nations in New York. China is represented by Zhang Gaoli, Vice Premier of China, and Special Envoy of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Zhang said that after China signs the Paris Agreement today, it will work hard to earnestly implement it. Zhang said China will finalize its internal process to join the agreement before it hosts the G20 Summit in Hangzhou in September 2016, and will encourage other G20 members to quickly join the agreement as well.

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China's 1-2-3 Punch to Tackle Wasted Renewable Energy

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Ranping Song and Miao Hong

This post originally appeared on WRI’s Insights blog:

China has emerged as a leader in renewable energy. Investment soared from $39 billion to $111 billion in just five years, while electric capacity for solar power grew 168-fold and wind power quadrupled.  Actual renewable energy utilization also grew. The total share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption increased from 8.3 percent in 2010 to 12 percent in 2015, beating the country’s target of 11.4 percent and putting China well on track to meet its Copenhagen pledge to reach 15 percent by 2020 and Paris commitment to reach 20 percent by 2030.

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Carbon Capture and Storage: Prospects after Paris

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Katie Lebling and Xiaoliang Yang

This post originally appeared on WRI’s Insights blog:

Momentum for climate action has surged since the Paris Agreement in December, with increased investment in clean, renewable energy and new energy technologies. But will the Agreement give a needed boost to carbon capture and storage? Known as CCS, this suite of technologies aims to keep climate-warming carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, acting as a bridge to a lower-carbon future.

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U.S.-China S&ED Outcomes Show Continued Progress on Climate Change Cooperation

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Chris Henderson

The eighth round of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue concluded today, June 7th, in Beijing. The Dialogue produced numerous outcomes for U.S.-China cooperation on climate change and energy, which are summarized in the document linked below. (See Section III) The two countries committed to work together to implement the Paris Agreement, launched a new cooperation initiative on renewable energy, and committed to continuation and strengthening of cooperation on a wide array of other low-carbon energy projects.

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23 Chinese Cities Commit to Peak Carbon Emissions by 2030

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Wee Kean Fong

This post originally appeared on WRI’s insights blog.

More than half the world’s people live in cities, and cities are responsible for more than 70 percent of all energy-related carbon dioxide emissions on Earth. These dramatic statistics mean cities have a critical role to play in addressing climate change. This is especially crucial in China, where fast-growing metropolitan areas like Chengdu – with a population of 14 million – have become engines for economic, scientific and technological progress. Until recently, Chengdu has not focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, even as it emphasized sustainable development.

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4 Lessons on Scaling Up Sustainable Transport in US and Chinese Cities

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Lulu Xue

This post originally appeared on WRI’s insights blog.

Transportation is already a major source of CO2 emissions in both China and the United States—at 20 percent and 30 percent, respectively. The percentage of people traveling by car is increasing in Chinese cities, rising from 15 percent to 34 percent in Beijing between 2002 and 2013, creating air pollution and fueling climate change.

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Decline in China's Coal Consumption Explained

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Chris Henderson

In a post discussing the decline in China’s coal consumption, Fergus Green, London School of Economics, highlights the connection between the slowdown in energy demand growth and the change in China’s economic growth model from energy-intensive industries to high-tech manufacturing and services. Government policy is supporting non-fossil energy and limits on coal due to drivers such as climate change, energy security, air pollution, and pursuit of commercial opportunities.

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Making China's Economic Transition Work for Global Climate and the Local Environment

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Valerie Karplus and Michael Davidson

When it was first announced in late 2014, China’s climate pledge was a bold and unprecedented step that gave new confidence to global efforts to mitigate climate change. This pledge, enshrined in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, commits the country to peak its emissions at latest by 2030 through steady reductions in carbon intensity and deployment of non-fossil energy. As the world’s largest energy user and emitter, and second largest economy, China’s move placed a significant dent in global emissions projections at the time.

Today, the combination of China’s economic slowdown and proactive government realignment of internal priorities toward more sustainable growth has led to lower projections of the country’s emissions trajectory. The question is no longer whether or not China will be able to meet its pledge—indeed, a peak sooner than 2030 looks well within reach, suggesting China’s climate pledge was both prudent and credible.

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China's Climate Leadership and the G20 Summit

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Joanna Lewis

Climate change is the area in which China has shown perhaps the strongest international leadership. As China hosts the G20, we can expect energy and climate to be front and center.

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Ahead of G20 in Hangzhou, U.S. and China Join Paris Agreement

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Chris Henderson

On September 3rd, 2016, the United States and China formally joined the Paris Agreement on climate change. The announcement came at a bilateral meeting between President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping on Saturday, ahead of the upcoming G20 summit in Hangzhou, China. The announcement provides a major boost in the momentum behind the effort needed for the Paris Agreement to enter into force, which is likely to happen before the end of 2016. In order for the agreement to enter into force, a total of 55 countries representing 55% of global GHG emissions must join. China and the United States are the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, accounting for a combined 38% of global emissions.

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China’s Air Pollution Standards Will Drive Technology Innovation

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Deborah Seligsohn

While Chinese air pollution has become world famous, over the last couple of years there has been a slowly growing awareness that the Chinese government is working hard to reduce it, and in fact in the last five years pollution levels have been falling. What has not yet come to world attention, and in fact, few Chinese have really focused on, is that China has the potential to become the world leader in standard setting, at least in the two most polluting sectors, power and oil and gas. What this means is that China is now or soon will be demanding new technologies and new solutions to reduce air pollution, and thus its regulatory demands will become a driver of innovation.

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