Chinese and US climate envoys renew talks in lead-up to COP28 - South China Morning Post

‘Encouraging sign’: Chinese and US climate envoys renew talks in lead-up to COP28, Apec summit | South China Morning Post

Chinese and American climate envoys agreed to maintain close communication after another round of talks on Thursday via a video call, a week after they held the first face-to-face dialogue in nearly a year in Beijing. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment said in a statement that China’s climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua , and his US counterpart John Kerry exchanged views on strengthening dialogue and promoting cooperation in the global multilateral climate process. The talks were at the request of the US side, the Chinese statement said. Climate experts described the latest exchange between the two climate envoys as an “encouraging sign” for both US-China relations and the global climate agenda in the lead-up to the COP28 United Nations climate talks in Dubai in November. Despite a lack of breakthroughs, Kerry’s four-day trip to China last week marked the resumption of bilateral talks on climate change, which were suspended by Beijing after former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip in August last year. After his “extremely warm and productive” talks with Xie and meetings with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi, Premier Li Qiang and Vice-President Han Zheng, Kerry said both sides committed to “work intensively in the weeks ahead” for the Dubai gathering. But despite the “mutual alarm” between the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters at the looming climate crisis, Kerry admitted the US side “realised that it’s going to take a little bit more work to break the new ground”. Kerry was the third senior US administration official to visit Beijing in a month, following Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen , and is the only cabinet member of the administration of US President Joe Biden to visit China three times. US and China can cooperate on climate policy but tech remains tricky: experts Li Shuo, a senior global policy adviser for Greenpeace East Asia, said the latest round of talks between Kerry and Xie underlined the two countries’ shared interests in achieving tangible results in the coming weeks. “It seems that both sides want to work towards this year’s Apec summit [for a potential Biden-Xi meeting], which is an important moment in US-China relations, as well as the COP28 Dubai climate conference,” he said. He noted that both sides appeared eager to present some “ambitious and agreed outcomes at COP28”, as Kerry put it in Beijing last week. Li described the resumption of climate dialogue and the frequent communications between the climate envoys as “fairly positive”. “There are many difficult issues on the international agenda of climate politics that will be difficult to resolve in the multilateral arena if the United States and China do not meet towards finding a middle ground,” he said. But Li also noted that during Kerry’s Beijing trip, the two sides did not appear to agree on when and where the two climate envoys would meet in person again, which he said could be more productive than online talks. “But it’ll largely depend on the dynamics of the US-China relations in the coming weeks and domestic politics on both sides. We’ll have to wait and see,” he said. Singaporean Minister for Sustainability and the Environment Grace Fu also voiced hopes that the US and China could work together to give global climate negotiations a “big push”, especially at the G20 summit in India in September, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, in a meeting with the UAE ambassador to China Hussain bin Ibrahim Al Hammadi, Xie underlined China’s support for the United Arab Emirates’ hosting of COP28, according to the official Xinhua news agency.