Opinion

Global warming

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-09-30 11:31

Flexibility and compromise are essential to paving way for translating the targets and projects made in Copenhagen into specific legally biding treaties against global warming at the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Cancun in December.

Next month's Tianjin meeting, the last round of negotiations leading up to the Cancun climate talks, is of great importance to how much the upcoming negotiations in Mexico will be able to achieve. That's why China as the host country is attaching such importance to it and trying to do whatever it can to facilitate the negotiations.

As the biggest developing country, China knows that it must do whatever possible in the fight against global warming. China has promised that it will cut the intensity of its greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP by 40 to 50 percent by 2020. By then, non-fossil power is intended to provide 15 percent of the country's total energy consumption and its forest coverage is to have been increased by 40 million hectares.

It will be no easy task for a developing country with 150 million residents still living under the United Nation's poverty line to fulfill these targets. But to the Chinese government they are an obligation that it must perform in the interest of its own as well as the world's future.

In the past five years, China has already shut down a large number of thermal power generators and effectively raised the proportions of clean energy in the total supply.

Jailed tycoon loses battle for Gome Related readings:  Eco-city poised for leading role  Pollution reduction on target  China to upgrade exports by boosting low-carbon sector

In the first four years of its 11th Five-Year-Plan (2006-2010), backward production lines with a capacity of more than 80 million tons of crude iron and more than 60 million tons of steel were closed. Outdated cement works were also closed. The coal saved by these efforts reached 110 million tons. However difficult it might be, China has promised that it will further cut carbon dioxide emissions.

But as a developing country, China does need help from the developed countries when it comes to the technology to cut greenhouse gas emissions. So do the other developing countries.

Developed nations have pledged almost $30 billion in aid from 2010 to 2012 and up to $100 billion annually by 2020 in the Copenhagen Accord.

Yet, the accord is not legally binding, and there has been no agreement so far as to where the money will come from and how it is going to be paid and used.

The Tianjin meeting is just around the corner. All participants need to bear in mind that we've got only one Earth and we cannot afford to further drag our feet on the specific actions that all countries, the major ones in particular, must take to prevent the temperature from rising further.

Hopefully, the meeting will substantially contribute to the Cancun climate talks.