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As the biggest carbon emitter in the world, China is facing tremendous pressure domestically and internationally. To promote the international efforts to tackle climate change, the Chinese government announced its 2020 carbon intensity target and is actively taking part in the international climate negotiations. In this paper, we review some of the climate burden-sharing proposals raised by Chinese scholars to shed some light on China's perspective on the post-Kyoto climate architecture. Then we summarize China's current pollution abatement policies and measures, and analyze some potential policy instruments for China to reconcile its future economic growth and carbon mitigation, as well as some practical design and enforcement issues to be considered for the near term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol has not yet materialized, the 2009 Copenhagen meeting underlined the importance of China in international debates on climate and energy. This is based not only on China's current climate emissions, but also on its expected energy use and economic growth. Within China, climate issues have, like environmental pollution more generally, received increasing government and societal attention, but so has energy – topics that relate to one other but also have different priorities and actor interests behind them. However, while climate change has become more prominent, as shown in the targets included in the current five-year plan, its institutional embeddedness in relation to particularly energy issues has received limited attention. This paper aims to help shed some light on how Chinese policies and governance structures on energy, climate and environment have evolved, particularly considering the roles of national and provincial authorities. Administrative structures and policy-making processes turn out to be very complex, with a range of units and bodies at different levels with distinct responsibilities as well as inter-linkages. Moreover, tensions and conflicts can be found regarding climate change and environmental policies on the one hand, and prevailing objectives to further economic development on the other. Energy policies serve the same economic goals, with climate change being most often operationalized in terms of energy conservation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to fight against the climate change, China has set a series of emission reduction policies for super‐emitting sectors. The cement industry is the major source of process‐related emissions, and more attention should be paid to this industry. This study calculates the process‐related, direct fossil fuel–related, and indirect electricity‐related emissions from China's cement industry. The study finds that China's cement‐related emissions peaked in 2014. The emissions are, for the first time, divided into seven parts based on the cement used in different new building types. The provincial emission analysis finds that developed provinces outsourced their cement capacities to less developed regions. This study then employs index decomposition analysis to explore the drivers of changes in China's cement‐related emissions. The results show that economic growth was the primary driver of emission growth, while emission intensity and efficiency were two offsetting factors. The changes in the construction industry's structure and improvement in efficiency were the two major drivers that contributed to the decreased emissions since 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic evolution is considered as being driven by innovation of research and development (R&D) even if regional characteristics usually have critical impacts on various culture-oriented living styles that change in a social transformation dynamically. In documented Chinese history, climate changes and geographic conditions are constraints of the economic evolution in ecologically fragile regions. Lots of unpublished indigenous knowledge of environmental adaptation as a part of culture have been excluded from innovative records. In this research, we review research records of several key factors closely associated with economic evolution in the history of study regions, including climate change, cultural transition, economic base, resource endowment and transportation accessibility. By surveying previous research records and contents, we examine the paths of economic evolution mixed with adaptive cultures response to climate change in each region and draw conclusions that (1) the economic evolution with regional climate changes interactively experience three stages of culture-hindered, culture-mixed, and culture-impelled adaptation diversely; (2) regions that have higher economic performance with less innovative records highly likely have a relatively large number of indigenous knowledge unpublished throughout cultural evolution; and (3) English world has research preference to the regions that have lower economic performance with a distinctive culture in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]