Taipei, Taiwan – China’s failure to meet a key carbon emissions target has raised concerns about its ability to achieve carbon neutrality, a potentially decisive factor in global efforts to avert the worst effects of climate change.
China’s carbon intensity – a measurement of carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) – fell 3.4 percent in 2024, missing Beijing’s official target of 3.9 percent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
China is also behind its longer-term goal of slashing carbon intensity by 18 percent between 2020 and 2025, as set by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in its most recent five-year plan.
Under China’s “dual targets”, President Xi Jinping has pledged to reach peak emissions before the end of the decade and carbon neutrality by 2060.
China’s progress is being closely watched around the world due to its paradoxical position as the world’s top polluter – responsible for about 30 percent of global emissions – and the world’s leader in renewable energy investment.
The country’s success or failure to meet its emissions targets will have major implications for the international community’s efforts to keep average temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, a benchmark set by the United Nations to avert “catastrophic” effects of climate change.
The chances of the planet being able to keep below the 1.5C threshold over the long-term are already in doubt, after 2024 became the first calendar year in history where temperatures breached the limit.
Although carbon intensity is just one of the benchmarks used by Beijing, it provides important insights into how decarbonisation is playing out across the economy, said Muyi Yang, a senior energy analyst at Ember, a global energy think tank based in the United Kingdom.
“Even though the economy continued to grow, the reduction in emissions relative to that growth wasn’t as rapid as intended,” Muyi told Al Jazeera.
The world’s second-largest economy relied heavily on industrial growth to power itself out of the economic slump caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but this in turn has led to a recent surge in energy demand, Muyi said.
While China’s economy officially grew 5 percent in 2024, electricity demand grew 6.8 percent year-on-year, according to government data.
Carbon emissions grew 0.8 percent year-on-year.
Record heatwaves have posed a further challenge to emission reduction efforts by disrupting energy production at hydropower dams, forcing authorities to make up the shortfall with coal power.
Despite the setbacks, Beijing has made remarkable achievements in renewable energy, according to Eric Fishman, a senior manager at the Lantau Group, an energy consultancy firm in Hong Kong.
China last year met 14.5 percent of its total energy demand with wind and solar power and another 13.4 percent with hydropower, according to government data.
The country also met about 75 percent of its incremental growth in energy demand – 500 out of 610 terawatt hours – with renewable energy, Fishman said, based on an analysis of government data.
The figure represents “massive amounts of clean energy” roughly equivalent to Germany’s annual energy consumption, Fishman told Al Jazeera.
Much of this growth has been driven by government support, including from the highest levels of the CCP.
Xi Jinping Thought, Xi’s governing ideology enshrined in the Chinese constitution, states that China must strive towards an “ecological civilisation”.
In 2021, Xi announced that “high energy consumption and high-emission projects that don’t meet requirements should be resolutely taken down”.
The same year, China launched its Emissions Trading Scheme, the world’s largest carbon trading market, under which firms that produce less emissions than their designated allowance can sell their unused allowances to polluters exceeding their limits.
More recently, Xi has called for China to focus on “new quality productive forces” and transition to more high-end and innovation-driven manufacturing, said Anika Patel, a China analyst at Carbon Brief.
“[China] has historically been seen as the ‘factory of the world’ but with a focus on the so-called ‘old three’, which are all lower-value products – appliances, clothing and toys. Now it wants to shift towards green growth and the ‘new three’, which is solar panels, electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries,” Patel told Al Jazeera.
The CCP will release its newest round of carbon emissions targets for 2026 to 2030 alongside its next five-year plan later this year, Patel said, which will impact the direction of both public and private sectors.
Yao Zhe, a global policy adviser for Greenpeace East Asia, said while China is on track to reach peak carbon before 2030, whether it can leave coal fully behind in the long term is less certain.
“Achieving carbon neutrality will require many more structural changes in China’s energy sector and economy as a whole. And those changes need to start soon after peak,” Yao told Al Jazeera.
“While Chinese policymakers are good at supporting the cleantech industry, they tend to defer these structural reforms to a later timeframe – possibly later than 2035 – and this is a real concern.”
