Assessing China's carbon intensity pledge for 2020: stringency and credibility issues and their implications.

Just prior to the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, China pledged to cut its carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020 relative to its 2005 levels. This raises the issue of whether such a pledge is ambitious or just represents business as usual. To put China's climate pledge into perspective, this paper examines whether this pledge is as challenging as the energy-saving goals set in the 11th 5-year economic blueprint, to what extent it drives China's emissions below its projected baseline levels, whether China will fulfill its part of a coordinated global commitment to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions at the desirable level, and whether it is conservative and there is room for further increase. Our balanced analysis of China's climate pledge challenges the views of both some Western scholars and the Chinese government regarding its ambition. Given that China's pledge is in the form of carbon intensity, the paper shows that GDP figures are even more crucial to the impacts on the energy or carbon intensity than are energy consumption and emissions data. Finally, the paper emphasizes that China's proposed carbon intensity target not only needs to be seen as ambitious, but more importantly it needs to be credible, and suggests that international climate change negotiations need to focus on 2030 as the targeted date to cap the greenhouse gas emissions of the world's two largest emitters in a legally binding global agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]