Walking through each one in turn chronologically, this article then concludes with a summary of the three broader reasons why China’s stance on climate change has shifted.Ģ003: Xi starts a newspaper column called ‘Zhijiang Xinyu’ These moments – many of which have not been widely reported before – do not include the more obvious important incidents, such as Xi becoming China’s leader in 2012, or China ratifying the Paris Agreement in 2016.īut each of them – some of which might appear trivial at first – has impacted and influenced China’s current stance on climate change. Speaking to a diverse range of experts within China and beyond, Carbon Brief has learned that Xi has personally played “the most important role” in this shift in views.īelow, Carbon Brief describes nine key moments over the past two decades that have helped to influence China’s attitudinal change. Instead, it said rich, developed nations should be leading the way. Little over a decade ago, China was strongly arguing against reducing the emissions being caused by its booming, coal-fuelled economic growth. However, China’s attitude to addressing climate change has undergone a significant transformation over the course of this century. The pledges represent the latest staging posts on China’s long journey towards tackling its carbon emissions, which, currently, are the largest of any nation. China “will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad”, he said via videolink. Then, last month, he offered a further commitment to the same gathering of world leaders. In September 2020, he told the United Nations general assembly: “We aim to have CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.”

Over the past year, China’s president Xi Jinping has made three key commitments to tackle climate change.

Speech analysis premiere cc 2018