GHG Daily
1/25/2016
In a historic announcement in late September, China unveiled plans to launch a national carbon cap-and-trade program by 2017. Dan Dudek, the Environmental Defense Fund’s vice president for Asia, worked closely with Chinese officials through the process of developing a cap-and-trade system. “I’m still pinching myself because it is like a very, very long dream come true. … If you had asked me five years ago whether I could imagine the president of China announcing that he would launch a national carbon market in 2017, I would have thought it improbable,” Dudek said in an EDF special report.
The decision to launch a cap-and-trade program in China was made largely on self-interest, Dudek said in the paper. “With its rise on the world stage, China wants to be recognized as a responsible actor. Climate is one area it can show good global citizenship and bolster its international reputation. There’s also a growing demand from the Chinese public for clean air and a better balance between economic growth and pollution control.”
The intended development of a cap-and-trade system is just the latest step in an ongoing ratcheting up of climate change ambition in China according to the article. In 2014, the country pledges to peak its emissions by 2030. By the next year, Beijing and 10 other large Chinese cities and provinces promised to peak their emissions as early as 2020.
However, “we know a lot of work lies ahead to put caps in place and get a national carbon market up and running. It took California roughly eight years to develop and launch its carbon market and China is talking about doing something on a much bigger scale— a market that could be five times larger than California’s—in just over two years,” Dudek warned in the paper.
