Challenges to addressing non-CO₂ greenhouse gases in China’s long-term climate strategy

ABSTRACT

Under the Paris Agreement, countries are encouraged to submit long-term low greenhouse gas emissions development strategies. Such strategies will merge emissions goals with socio-economic objectives and enable countries to increase their ambition over time, thus offering an opportunity to close the gap between the current emissions trajectory and the Agreement’s ‘well below 2°C’ target. China is in the process of preparing its own long-term strategy. We argue in this article that non-CO₂ greenhouse gases (NCGGs) should be an essential component of China’s long-term low-emissions strategy. To incorporate NCGGs into China’s long-term low-emissions development strategy, key scientific and institutional challenges should be addressed, such as uncertainty about the accuracy of NCGG emissions inventories; uncertainty about future projections of NCGG emissions; and institutional coordination deficits and imbalanced policy approaches. Overcoming these barriers will have significant implications for climate change mitigation and can open a path for the development of concrete follow-up actions.

Key policy insights

• Non-CO₂ greenhouse gases (NCGGs) make up around 17% of China’s GHG emissions, but China has no quantified target to limit or reduce these gases.

• NCGG emissions mitigation should be an essential component of China's long-term low-emissions strategy, which is currently under development.

• Considerable uncertainty exists over both historical NCGG emissions data and forecasts. This poses challenges to developing a comprehensive multi-gas strategy.

• Institutional challenges must also be addressed, such as fragmentation of responsibility for NCGGs.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• low emissions development strategy
• non-CO₂ greenhouse gas (NCGG)
• Paris Agreement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Fei Teng http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0371-1142

Notes

1 Authors’ calculation based on communication with experts involved in the preparation of BUR1 of China.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71673162, No. 71741018) and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFA0602702).