Making climate pledges (Image: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

It’s a rare piece of good news on climate. After closed-door discussions, China and the US emerged yesterday to jointly release climate pledges that are giving some analysts hope that strong global agreements could be reached at the UN climate summit in Paris next year.

China – the world’s largest carbon emitter – has pledged its greenhouse gas emissions will peak by “around 2030”, while the US has pledged to cut emissions to 26-28 per cent lower than 2005 levels by 2025.

China has also agreed to increase the proportion of its energy produced from non-fossil fuel sources – nuclear and renewables – to 20 per cent by 2030.


Fresh beginning

US secretary of state, John Kerry, said in a statement that that this “breakthrough marks a fresh beginning: Two countries regarded for 20 years as the leaders of opposing camps in climate negotiations – have come together to find common ground, determined to make lasting progress on an unprecedented global challenge.”

And he said: “Our announcement can inject momentum into the global climate negotiations, which resume in less than three weeks in Lima, Peru, and culminate next year in Paris.” The commitment, he continued, “sends an important signal that we must get this agreement done, that we can get it done, and that we will get it done”.

“It’s the polar opposite of what we saw [at the UN climate summit] in Copenhagen in 2009,” says Frank Jotzo at the Australian National University in Canberra. “There we saw practically no coordination between the major powers in the lead-up to the summit. Now we have ambitious pledges a year out.”

“The US and China have now made a very clear statement of where they are at. And they will expect the smaller countries to come up with commitments that are comparable,” he says.

Setting an example

Dabo Guan of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, says this also sets an example for other developed countries such as Japan, Australia and Canada who, he says, have not shown much motivation to mitigate their emissions in recent years.

“I welcome some similar or even more ambitious commitments to be announced in Paris,” he adds.

But he adds that Chinese emissions will be about three times those of the US in 2030 and so China’s effort is crucial as it decides the global results of climate change mitigation. “I hope to see more ambitious plan announced by China in Paris,” he says.

Not ambitious

But Wang Tao of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Centre for Global Policy in Beijing says the targets are not surprisingly ambitious. “They are within the range of what people expected,” he says.

China suggested previously it might peak emissions by 2025 anyway, and its non-fossil-fuel energy mix is set to rise to 15 per cent by 2020.

And the US pledges are less ambitious that what was suggested in the long-term scoping at Copenhagen, says Robyn Eckersley of the University of Melbourne in Australia. There, the US indicated it might reduce emissions to 42 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Accelerating cuts

“But of course a lot has changed since 2009,” says Eckersley. “Things have got harder for Obama. He thought he might get [emissions] legislation through in his first term.”

On the plus side, Jotzo says, the pledges accelerate the US cuts after 2020. “It equates to about 2.5 per cent a year,” he says. “That’s a very significant annual reduction in greenhouse gases and faster than the rate required under the Copenhagen that ranged to 2020.”

It’s no surprise that the two giants were going to make a joint announcement, says Jotzo, but it is surprising the announcement came so early.

Tao says that if things go well, this could lead to a stronger agreement in Paris.

“It’s a very good starting point, not only with the US and China, but the EU as well, who announced their target a month ago, to start to have a kind of positive feedback on each other and to progress in the negotiations much quicker than we expected,” Tao says. “They could have held out until the last quarter next year. They decided to release them earlier and that’s a good sign.”