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New study finds China's carbon emissions may have peaked already

Xinhua, March 7, 2016 Adjust font size:

China's carbon dioxide emissions are likely to peak by 2025, and may even have done so already, according to a study co-authored by leading British economist Lord Stern.

The country's emissions have fallen and if this trend continues, it would show that China's emissions have already peaked, British media on Monday quoted Fergus Green, lead author of the report from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), as saying.

Green and Stern believe that if China's emissions have not already peaked, then they are very likely to do so within the next decade, bringing the country to its internationally agreed target years earlier than expected.

With the economic slowdown accompanied by government policies to pursue a low-carbon development path, the authors expect China's economic transition implies a decline of at least 4 percent in the country's energy intensity over the next decade.

This means primary energy consumption growth will slow to only 1.8 percent a year or less between now and 2025, compared with an annual rate of more than 8 percent between 2000 and 2013, the report said.

Meanwhile, China's energy will increasingly come from non-fossil sources, it added.

The new study comes at a time when China's annual parliament session is being held in Beijing, where the draft 13th Five-Year Plan, a roadmap charting a green economic path for the nation's development from 2016 to 2020, will be submitted to lawmakers for review and approval.

At the parliamentary session, China announced that, as binding targets by 2020, the country's energy consumption per unit of GDP will be cut by 15 percent, and carbon dioxide emissions will be cut by 18 percent.

Seeking a path to sustainable development, China, which has taken bold actions on its climate change fight, is poised to unveil a string of new policy measures to improve the industrial mix, build a low-carbon system, develop green building and low-carbon transportation, and establish a nationwide carbon-emission trading market. Endi