Nation will promote green Belt and Road
China will proactively participate in global ecological management and promote the green development of the Belt and Road Initiative, VicePremier Han Zheng said on Friday.
China has firmly established the concept of green development and has the capability to address prominent environmental problems, Han said at the opening of the Annual General Meeting of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development.
The council is a high-level international body composed of officials and experts from home and abroad that gives policy advice to the Chinese government. The theme for this year’s annual meeting is “Innovation for Green New Era”.
Han, also chairman of the council, said China has accelerated institutional reform and improved the legal system to achieve historic, transitional and comprehensive changes in ecological and environmental protection.
The country will vigorously implement the development strategy driven by innovation and advance supply-side structural reform to promote high-quality economic growth and high-level ecological and environmental protection, he said.
Han said China will endeavor to address prominent environmental problems that threaten people’s health and will resolutely fight ecological violations.
Catherine McKenna, executive vice-chairwoman of the council and Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, said China’s ambition of building an ecological civilization and a beautiful China is providing a new approach that focuses on harmonious coexistence between people and nature.
She said this year’s meeting will help ensure that leaders and influencers in China and around the world have the knowledge, science and evidence that the world needs to make the best decisions for the planet and mankind.
Li Ganjie, China’s ecology and environment minister and also the council’s executive vice-chairman, called on the council’s members to share their knowledge, experiences and wisdom to help the council make greater contributions to the construction of a beautiful China and a clean and beautiful world.
The country will vigorously implement the development strategy driven by innovation.
Innovative development and coordinated governance are keys to tackling climate change, experts said at the Annual General Meeting of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development on Friday.
Achim Steiner, administrator at the United Nations Development Programme, said it is a critical moment for China to think about future development and for the world to interact more with China. “There is a broader, more systematic approach to addressing climate change, for example, through innovative development pathways,” he said.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report recently estimating that the global temperature will increase an average of 1.5 C above preindustrial levels by 2030. That would mean more extreme weather, rising sea-levels and mass extinctions, posing a big threat to the ecosystem.
To stay below 1.5 C, carbon dioxide emissions would need to decline by 45 percent in the next decade, and the world needs to fully decarbonize by 2050, the report suggested.
Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, said one of the most essential solutions is through innovation, but not traditional innovation such as in technology or in agriculture. “We now have to think about innovation in total systems management. I’m talking about new models of governance and economic affairs, and that’s what we really need to raise the level of innovation and recreate these systems for the 21 century,” he said.
He Jiankun, of the Institute of Climate and Sustainable Development at Tsinghua University, said: “Breakthrough innovations in technology are one of the key solutions. The more important thing is the institutional innovation,” he said.
China has already made efforts in institutional reform, shifting climate duties from the National Development and Reform Commission to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.
Wang Yi, vice-president of the Institutes of Science and Development, Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the change unified supervision, elevated the climate issue and expanded the responsibilities to more areas including pollutant control, biodiversity protection and ocean management. Wang said China faces both challenges and opportunities. He proposed that an effective coordinated mechanism should be built, incorporating strategic goals including developing a low-carbon economy, upgrading industrial structure as well as transforming energy structure.
Governance efficacy, capacity and the execution should also be boosted by coordinating policymaking and other administration across different levels of government, including local officials, and China will also share experiences with its Belt and Road Initiative partners to push forward innovative and low-carbon development pathways globally.
“The 1.5 report is very much a wake-up call,” said Kate Hampton, CEO of Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, “and since the Paris Agreement, we’re also seeing an alarming lack of leadership in a number of countries, which can be the real danger for the international climate over the next few years if responsible countries do not step up and lead.”