Will China become a leader in global climate action?

As the COP29 climate summit in Baku enters crunch time, the spotlight has fallen on China.

With just a couple of days left for states to pull together a final agreement, there are hopes China will step in to fill a looming climate leadership void left by Donald Trump's reelection. The US president-elect has said he plans to pull back out of the Paris Agreement upon his return to the White House in January. 

"I think it's certainly an important moment and a great opportunity for China to step into this leadership gap," said Yao Zhe, policy analyst at Greenpeace East Asia, noting the country's progress on decarbonizing at home and its capacity to scale up technology. 

As the world's biggest carbon emitter and second-largest economy, negotiators are urging China to send a positive signal by setting more ambitious emissions cut targets — and to step up its responsibility on climate finance. 

A key aim of the summit this year is to come up with a funding goal — known as the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG) — to help support poorer countries cope with climate change.

Leading economists have estimated that by the end of the decade, developing countries will need $1 trillion (€95 billion) a year to help them reduce emissions and deal with the impacts of extreme weather.

Industrialized countries responsible for most historical emissions that have caused planetary heating are supposed to contribute to the fund for developing countries. But delegates from the US, EU and some developing countries have said China should also contribute.

Though a major economy, the UN still technically classes China as a developing country.  

Why is China being urged to contribute more? 

Developing countries that are major emitters and have the capacity to commit to climate financing should do so, according to Rizwana Hasan, adviser to the Environment Ministry for Bangladesh's interim government. "China can contribute, others can contribute, India can contribute to some extent," said Hasan.

But China's representatives at COP29 have said they will only continue to make voluntary commitments to climate finance. The country, which has not contributed to a previously agreed goal of developed countries to raise $100 billion annually, said it has provided around $24.5 billion in financing since 2016. It has also invested heavily in solar and wind power, and electric vehicles.

On the question of whether Beijing should be required to contribute to the NCQG, Adonia Ayebare, chair of the G77 coalition of developing countries and China group, told DW: "They're chipping in already, no? They're part of the G77. They have the biggest solar panels in the world. They produce them and we buy them."

Niklas Höhne, an expert in climate policy at the nonprofit think tank New Climate Institute, agrees that even if China is not officially mentioned as contributing to climate finance, in reality, they already do. "They finance a lot of projects outside of their country. Right now, it's at least $3 billion a year," he said.

Recognizing the contributions countries like China have already made could be a "strong motivation to unblock discussions," said Celine Kauffmann, chief programs officer at IDDRI, an independent policy research institute focusing on sustainable development.

China's climate action — a contradictory picture

Another key reason for pressure on China to signal leadership and set new emissions targets is the pivotal role the country plays in global greenhouse gas emissions, said Höhne. 

"China is so big. It's a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. So, if China peaks and declines, then also global greenhouse gas emissions peak and decline," he said. 

China currently produces around twice as many emissions as the US, which is the second-largest polluter, and is responsible for 90% of global CO2 emissions growth since 2015.  

The Paris Agreement calls on developed countries to take the lead in climate action due to their disproportionately large historical emissions. However, China's own historical emissions now surpass those of the EU, according to an analysis from UK-based climate science and policy platform Carbon Brief.

Yet China is also a global leader when it comes to investment and expansion of green power. In 2023, the country invested $273 billion in clean energy, followed by Europe, which spent around half that. 

China's investments in renewables accounted for a third of all those worldwide, according to the International Energy Agency, which says China also commissioned as much solar PV in 2023 as the entire world in 2022 and that its wind capacity grew by 66% last year. Almost 60% of new electric car registrations are in China. 

In September 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping said the country aimed to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. 

But according to a Climate Change Performance Index published on Wednesday, China ranked 55 out of 67 countries monitored for progress on climate action.

The index noted that despite being a renewables powerhouse and on the cusp of peaking emissions, it lacks sufficient climate targets and remains heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Coal provides most of the country's energy, and production hit a record high in 2023, according to the IEA. 

To keep global heating under the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold (2.7 Fahrenheit), the world needs to drastically cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, said Niklas Höhne. 

"That's why everybody's hoping that China can propose a target on a significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and they can, because renewables are really expanding very, very fast in China," he added.

Tim Schauenberg contributed to this report from the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Correction, November 21, 2024: A previous version of this article misattributed a quote to the former environment minister of Bangladesh. This has now been corrected. That version also incorrectly stated that Rizwana Hasan is Bangladesh's environment minister. She is an adviser to the Environment Ministry for Bangladesh's interim government.

Edited by: Jennifer Collins