China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Make-good partners
Green cooperation will lay the best foundation for China-EU relations
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the China-EU comprehensive strategic partnership. Following the visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz last year, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, French President Emmanuel Macron, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visited China this spring.
China and the European Union have held various multilevel dialogues and people-to-people exchanges on issues such as climate change and ecological protection, and cooperation on green development.
The two sides have a broad consensus and a solid foundation for cooperation in addressing global challenges such as biodiversity loss and climate change, but they also face some obstacles and difficulties. Besides the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the world is suffering from increasingly severe environmental challenges and the raging anti-globalization wave, and the pace of building a multipolar world has slowed down.
China and the EU need to cultivate mutual understanding and trust, and reconstruct and optimize their cooperation mechanisms. Efforts should be made to further deepen and stabilize the China-EU comprehensive strategic partnership through strengthening cooperation in global environmental governance.
The implementation of the Paris Agreement on climate change will be reviewed globally this year. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report points out that controlling non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions such as methane is a necessary condition for achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement globally. The reduction of methane emissions has taken “center stage” in global climate governance. In its EU methane strategy released in 2020, the European Commission proposed measures to reduce methane emissions within the EU and internationally. The EU signed the “Global Methane Pledge” during last year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, announcing it would contribute to the collective goal of reducing global methane emissions by at least 30 percent from the 2020 levels by 2030. China has long attached great importance to this issue. In 2021, methane control was included in the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) and became a key task of China’s non-carbon dioxide control and climate change response. At the fifth Ministerial on Climate Action held in the same year, China declared its intention to increase its efforts to control methane emissions. It has also released the Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s with the US, making methane emissions reduction one of the key areas for cooperation between the two sides.
China and the EU are among the largest methane emitters in the world. If the two sides can cooperate on methane emissions control, they will upgrade the global goal of methane emissions control from a political consensus to the UN’s climate change negotiation system, thereby ramping up global efforts to control greenhouse gases. However, there are still problems such as deficient basic data, outdated monitoring technology, and a lack of effective measures for controlling methane emissions worldwide. It’s necessary for China and the EU to work together first to build a fair and reasonable methane emissions control monitoring, accounting, reporting and verification system based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, so as to lead the international community to speed up the transition to the carbon-neutral era.
Finance is the core issue that needs to be resolved to address the dual crises of climate change and ecological loss. The latest estimations indicate that the world would face an annual shortfall of $598 billion to $824 billion to stop large-scale ecological loss globally and the global climate financing gap is about $3.6 trillion to $4.1 trillion annually.
The current global financing is insufficient to achieve the goals set by the Paris Agreement and the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. China and the EU can play a leading role in encouraging the financial sector’s engagement in global environmental governance. In 2016, China included green finance as part of the G20 summit agenda for the first time and proposed the setting-up of a G20 Green Finance Study Group, which was widely recognized by European countries. In 2019, the two sides launched the International Platform for Sustainable Finance to promote the convergence of international green finance standards. In 2021, during the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, China released the report “Common Ground Taxonomy: Climate Change Mitigation” with the EU. On June 3, 2022, the two sides initiated an updated version of the report. The new version plays a constructive role in promoting the comparability, compatibility and consistency of green finance standards in China and the EU and even in the world.
Moreover, the financial institutions of China and the EU have actively promoted the development of sustainable finance by balancing the dual goals of profitability and greening. Europe’s green bond issuance continued to lead the world with an amount of $101.5 billion in the first half of 2022, accounting for 47 percent of the global total. China ranked first in the world in terms of issuance ($48.2 billion, accounting for 22 percent of the total), number of bonds (190) and number of issuers (116). In 2021, the Macao branch of China Construction Bank issued the world’s first three-year $500 million green bond based on the Common Ground Taxonomy. Afterwards, in 2022, Bank of China’s branches in Frankfurt and Paris also followed suit. However, China and the EU’s green finance is still facing difficulties in stimulating the vitality of market players, reducing the cost of green finance standards and connecting the supply and demand on market. The two sides should make great efforts to seize the window period of their green transformation.
In recent years, globalization and multilateralism have not taken a turn for the better, and the public health crisis, RussiaUkraine conflict, global inflation, supply chain disruptions and energy market turbulence have exacerbated the geopolitical competition between countries. Although the China-EU ties are still moving forward, they are less stable than they were. In recent visits, both sides expressed their desire to comprehensively restart dialogue and cooperation at all levels and in various fields. Green cooperation is the area with the greatest consensus and the best foundation for China-EU cooperation.
In addition to overcoming the specific operational difficulties mentioned above, sincere cooperation is the only way for China and the EU to restart their partnership worldwide and effectively address many global challenges. The pressing global challenges, such as biodiversity loss and climate change, will not be alleviated by intensified competition among countries, and global environmental governance will instead be dragged down by the zero-sum mindset. If countries do not trust each other but are obsessed with decoupling, sanctions, and blockades, and view partners as opponents, it is difficult to imagine that human society can overcome these severe challenges. Both China and the EU are key participants in global sustainable development and biodiversity conservation, and they maintain close exchanges and positive cooperation in a wide range of fields, including biodiversity and climate change. By persistently and firmly promoting the China-EU green partnership can they inject consistent momentum for improved global environmental governance.
Both China and the EU are key participants in global sustainable development and biodiversity conservation, and they maintain close exchanges and positive cooperation in a wide range of fields, including biodiversity and climate change.
The author is an associate researcher of the Institute of European Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.