Decreasing emissions and increasing sink capacity to support China in achieving carbon neutrality before 2060

In September 2020, President Xi Jinping announced that China strives to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. This ambitious and bold commitment was well received by the global community. However, the technology and pathway are not so clear. Here, we conducted an extensive review covering more than 200 published papers and summarized the key technologies to achieve carbon neutrality. We projected sectoral CO2 emissions for 2020-2050 based on our previous studies and published scenarios. We applied a medium sink scenario for terrestrial sinks due to the potential resource competition and included an ocean sink, which has generally not been included in previous estimates. We analyzed and revisited China's historical terrestrial carbon sink capacity from 1980-2020 based on multiple models and a literature review. To achieve neutrality, it is necessary to increase sink capacity and decrease emissions from many sources. On the one hand, critical measures to reduce emissions include decreasing the use of fossil fuels; substantially increasing the proportion of the renewable energy and nuclear energy. On the other hand, the capacity of future carbon sinks is projected to decrease due to the natural evolution of terrestrial ecosystems, and anthropogenic management practices are needed to increase sink capacity, including increasing the forest sinks through national ecological restoration projects and large-scale land greening campaigns; increasing wood harvesting and storage; and developing CCUS. This paper provides basic source and sink data,and established and promising new technologies for decreasing emissions and increasing sinks for use by the scientific community and policy makers.
Comment: needs further revisions in policy part