Xi’s climate speech wins global praise
President’s reiteration of carbon goals and vow to cut coal consumption hailed across the world
President Xi Jinping’s speech on April 22 at the Leaders Summit on Climate, where he set out China’s ambitious pledges, has won praise from world leaders and experts.
In the speech, Xi talked about how man and nature should build a community of life together, and vowed that the country will take aggressive measures to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, including moves to begin phasing out coal.
“Faced with unprecedented challenges in global environmental governance, the international community needs to come up with unprecedented ambition and action. We need to act with a sense of responsibility and unity, and work together to foster a community of life for man and nature,” Xi said.
“I think what President Xi had to say about the harmony with nature was absolutely vital,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a speech shortly after the Xi address.
“If we’re going to tackle climate change sustainably, we have to deal with the disaster of habitat loss and species loss across our planet and we want to see even more examples of government and private industry working hand in hand as with the newly launched LEAF Coalition to reduce deforestation and the multitrillion dollar Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero,” said Johnson, referring to global initiatives to protect tropical forests and speed up net zero transition.
The Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance, or LEAF, Coalition is a public-private initiative that aims to speed up climate action by providing financial support to nations that are committed to protecting their tropical forests.
The United Kingdom will host COP26 in Glasgow in November while China will host the UN Biodiversity Conference in October.
In his speech, Gaston Browne, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, praised China and the US for their pledges at the virtual meeting, which was hosted by the US and drew 40 world leaders.
“We are grateful that the United States and China have pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and we look forward to swift action in their transitioning into carbon neutral economies,” Browne said.
Speaking of China’s actions to deal with the climate crisis, Xi said the country adheres to a path that puts ecological conservation first while pursuing green and low-carbon growth.
Xi announced last year that China will peak its carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and will achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.
“This major strategic decision is made based on our sense of responsibility to build a community with a shared future for mankind and our own need to secure sustainable development,” Xi said.
Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the
London School of Economics and Political Science, said that Xi also added for the first time that China will strictly limit the increase in coal consumption during the period of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) and will phase down coal during the 15th FiveYear Plan (2026-30).
“This suggests that China could reach its peak emissions by 2025, or soon after, which would be a significant advance in ambition,” said Stern, a British economist.
Hege Fjellheim, head of Norwaybased Carbon Research at Refinitiv, said that Xi’s speech “adds to the positive momentum for global climate change mitigation in the year of COP26”.
“The reference to some regions and sectors to peak emissions earlier could hint towards an aim of China achieving carbon peak ahead of 2030,” Fjellheim said.
Anri Sharapov, a professor at the Tashkent State University of Oriental Studies in Uzbekistan, said Xi’s speech demonstrated that China is always an active participant in facing global climate change.
“As a major power with responsibility, Xi’s remarks showed the world the determination (of) China to protect the environment and solve climate change problems, which will definitely increase the confidence of the international community to jointly face the challenges of climate change,” Sharapov said.
Hiroshi Onishi, an economics professor at Keio University in Tokyo, said it is of crucial significance to see that China and the US work together to tackle climate change.
“By doing so, it sends a clear signal to the world that we do need to worry about climate change and sometimes take harsh measures to fix it,” Onishi said.
Serik Korzhumbayev, editor-inchief of the newspaper Delovoy Kazakhstan, said it is remarkable that in recent years China has been following the new development philosophy and adhering to the path of green and low-carbon development.
Kelly Gallagher, professor of energy and environment at The Fletcher School at Tufts University in the US, said Xi “essentially confirms that China will stay the course, continuing to reduce coal as a percentage of primary energy through 2030”.
She noted that China’s newly added capacity in renewables dwarfs its newly added coal capacity.
“China’s added capacity in renewables in 2020 was almost twice as large as US added capacity,” she said on social media on April 22.
Xi’s vision of a community with a shared future for mankind has climate action at its core. But the building of this common future must also be a shared responsibility, by all countries and all sectors, to keep the global temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees, said Renato Redentor Constantino, executive director of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities in Manila.