Q&A: What does China’s new Paris Agreement pledge mean for climate action?

This is China’s third pledge under the Paris Agreement, but is the first to put firm constraints on the country’s emissions by setting an “absolute” target to reduce them.

China’s leader spoke via video to a UN climate summit in New York organised by secretary general António Guterres, making comments seen as a “veiled swipe” at US President Donald Trump.

The headline target, with its undefined peak-year baseline, falls “far short” of what would have been needed to help limit warming to well-below 2°C or 1.5°C, according to experts.

Moreover, Xi’s pledge for non-fossil fuels to make up 30 per cent of China’s energy is far below the latest forecasts, while his goal for wind and solar capacity to reach 3,600 gigawatts (GW) implies a significant slowdown, relative to recent growth.

Overall, the targets for China’s new 2035 “nationally determined contribution” (NDC) under the Paris Agreement have received a lukewarm response, described as “conservative”, “too weak” and as not reflecting the pace of clean-energy expansion on the ground.

Nevertheless, Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI), tells Carbon Brief that the pledge marks a “big psychological jump for the Chinese”, shifting from targets that constrained emissions growth to a requirement to cut them.

Below, Carbon Brief unpacks what China’s new targets mean for its emissions and energy use, pending further details once its full NDC is formally published in full.

What is in China’s new climate pledge?

For now, the only available information on China’s 2035 NDC is the short series of pledges in Xi’s speech to the UN.

Xi’s speech is the first time his country has promised to place an absolute limit on its greenhouse gas emissions, marking a significant shift in approach.

Xi had previously pledged that China would peak its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions “before 2030”, without defining at what level, reaching “carbon neutrality” by 2060.

He also outlined a handful of other key targets for 2035, shown in the table below against the goals set in previous NDCs.

Table: Carbon Brief

In his speech, Xi also said that, by 2035, “new energy vehicles” would be the “mainstream” for new vehicle sales, China’s national carbon market would cover all “major high-emission industries” and that a “climate-adaptive society” would be “basically established”.