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Climate change: China’s coal reliance raises alarms as UN IPCC moves net-zero deadlines ahead 10 years for 1.5-degree goal

  • China’s reluctance to ditch coal due to energy-security concerns will make the country’s decarbonisation even harder, climate experts say
  • UN’s new goals require ‘much faster emissions reductions than China is currently prepared to target’, an analyst says

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A photo taken on October 24, 2021, shows a worker leveling coal on a carrier in Jiujiang, in China’s central Jiangxi province. Photo: AFP
Yujie Xuein Shenzhen
The United Nations’ call for a “quantum leap” on climate action has heightened concern about China’s coal reliance among climate analysts, as the UN moves the global deadline for net-zero emissions forward by a decade to 2050 – 10 years ahead of China’s 2060 carbon-neutral goal.

China’s reluctance to ditch coal due to energy-security concerns, as evidenced by Beijing’s recent greenlighting of more coal-fired power plants, will make the country’s decarbonisation progress even harder, climate experts said.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading climate-science body, on Monday released a landmark report summarising the panel’s findings in the past five years and giving a comprehensive assessment of how the global climate crisis is unfolding.

“The climate time-bomb is ticking,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a statement to mark the launch of the IPCC report on Monday. “Humanity is on thin ice – and that ice is melting fast.”

Workers unload coal at a storage site along a railway station in Hefei, Anhui province in October 2009. Photo: Reuters
Workers unload coal at a storage site along a railway station in Hefei, Anhui province in October 2009. Photo: Reuters

According to the report, the hurdles to keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100 have become even higher due to a continued increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This has left the current plans and pace of climate actions insufficient to tackle climate change, the report said.

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