China’s monitoring of emissions is getting better as the country understands climate risks and continues to work with other countries to fight the problem, a U.S. expert said.
Barbara Finamore, Asia director at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a U.S.-based environmental advocacy group, said that China is taking all efforts to meet its climate commitments and even exceed it.
Finamore said in a written interview that CO2 emissions will peak by 2030 or earlier, and that China is committed to obtain one-fifth of its energy through non-fossil sources by 2030, since the trends are clear and China intends to increase its renewables uptake through green dispatch.
In September, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that in 2014, China's energy-content-based coal consumption was essentially flat, and production dropped by 2.6 percent, Finamore said.
The director added that as clean and non-fossil energy including hydro, wind, nuclear and solar continue to expand and replace coal consumption, the decline continued in 2015.
Since 2013, China's cities and provinces with heavy air pollution have been asked to reduced their coal consumption and have been eliminating old coal-fired boilers and equipment, replacing them with more efficient equipment, combined heat and power, and switched to natural gas.
Finamore reminded the government of the urgent need to reduce dependence on coal. She, however, said that close to 21 provinces and autonomous regions and more than 30 cities have already set different targets for coal consumption reduction.
These efforts would help put a national coal cap and reduce the share of coal in China's energy consumption from the current 66 percent to below 58 percent by 2020, which would provide the basis for the development in clean energy industries while protecting the environment and conserving resources efficiently, the expert said.
Finamore added this would help China reduce its CO2 emissions by 2025, five years earlier than its current target. She said that the United States and China are partners in the global shift away from dirty fuels like coal, toward clean energy alternative fuel like wind and solar.
"China has invested more in this shift than any other country on Earth," Finamore said.