By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Nov 16 2007 (IPS)

As China forges a cleaner development model that befits its size and population it expects the rich countries of the industrialised West to subsidise its efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas (GhG) emissions that cause global warming.

As world leaders are scheduled to meet in Bali, Indonesia next month to decide on the future of global action on climate change, China with its vast programme of building coal-fired power stations has come under growing pressure to cut its rising GhG emissions.

The rapidly industrialising country relies on coal for nearly two-thirds of its power. Coal is the fossil that releases the most carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary gas linked to global warming. The International Energy Agency says by next year China will overtake the United States as the leader in carbon emissions, while some studies suggest that this has already occurred.

So far Beijing has resisted inclusion in global climate-change pacts, arguing that global warming is primarily the fault of Western industrialised nations and they should be made to bear the brunt of cleanup costs.

While China recognises that its unprecedented wave of industrialisation may be contributing a large chunk of GhG emissions, it has opposed mandatory limits on them saying emission caps could cripple its growth while it is still a developing country.

Instead Beijing has concentrated on designing what it calls a new model for industrial development – in contrast to the fossil-fuelled Western economic development path that reduces GhGs through increased energy efficiency. Chinese officials say the country can’t afford to pollute first and clean up later the way they see that West has done because of its huge size and vast population.

On several occasions this year China has raised the importance of funds and technology from the West for its drive to combat climate change.

Announcing its domestic funding for research on climate change has doubled over the past 18 months compared with the previous five-year period, Chinese officials said earlier this summer that the country was still falling behind in its energy efficiency targets for the lack of technology.

Beijing had allocated nearly 5 billion yuan (672 million dollars) since last year to research how to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, including new energy and power conservation methods, and future climate problems, according to Sun Hong, deputy director of the Science and Technology Ministry.

“Nevertheless, China is facing big difficulties in reaching energy efficiency targets at the moment,” he told the media at a press briefing in July. “Its success depends on technological advances”.

For the current Five-Year Plan (2006-2010), central planners have committed to lowering the county’s energy consumption per unit of GDP 20 percent by 2010 – or four percent a year. But Chinese industries fell well short of that target in the first year, achieving a reduction of only 1.3 percent in 2006.

Last week, China launched a fund to steer money from the sale of emission-reduction credits into environmental projects in another attempt to curb its output of GhGs. The new fund will receive a portion of the money paid to Chinese companies under a global system called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), set up under the Kyoto protocol.

The CDM, under which industrialised countries can offset their emissions by funding emission-reduction projects in developing countries, has enjoyed robust growth in China and the country is set to become the world’s biggest supplier of carbon credits by 2012. Some 885 projects have so far been approved by the Chinese government, according to Xie Zhenhua, a vice-minister with the National Reform and Development Commission.

“The CDM is a win-win mechanism for all parties involved in combating climate change,” Xie said at the fund launching ceremony. The fund hopes to raise 3 billion dollars for supporting conservation-relating projects.

Prof. Pan says Chinese officials see the CDM as part of the country’s “conditional pledge” to tackle GhG emissions. “It is a shared commitment but China as a developing country would act in line with its own limited responsibility for global warming”.

In June this year China released its first national climate-change plan, which pledged to integrate efforts to mitigate GhG emissions into an overall plan for the country’s sustainable development. Unveiling the strategy, China’s top economic-planning official Ma Kai underscored that global warming is predominantly the fault of rich industrialised nations.

From the start of the Industrial Revolution until 1950, he said, 95 percent of the CO2 released in the atmosphere came from developed countries. From 1950 to 2002, developed countries accounted for 77 percent of GhG, Ma stressed.

But even as it points finger at the Western industrialised nations as the main culprits for global warming, China knows that it has limited time to act on climate change.

A report jointly released this week by an alliance of 23 aid and green groups in Britain warned that China is at particular risk from the effects of global warming.

The country where many of major economic centres sit in low-lying coastal areas could be exposed to extreme weather events such as landslides, severe floods and tropical storms if no action on climate change is taken, said the coalition, known as the Working Group on Climate and Development.

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