China's Climate Transition: Outlook 2023

27 November 2023
This report was published by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s (Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung) global head office in Berlin
Authors: Lauri Myllyvirta, Qi Qin, Chengcheng Qiu, Xinyi Shen

Executive summary
China’s success in meeting and exceeding its current climate targets is possibly the single most important factor in the global fight against climate change. Currently, progress on clean energy deployment is undermined by continued coal capacity expansion and a rapid growth of energy consumption. To successfully achieve a peaking and rapid decline of emissions, China will need increased efforts on energy efficiency, a successful transformation of the economic growth model, or even higher investments into clean energy.

China, the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter and the main source of emissions growth in the past two decades, holds a crucial role in global climate efforts. To enable global emissions to peak fast enough, China needs to not only meet but exceed its current emissions commitments.

In this series of annual reports, the autors break down China's progress to benchmarks for different sectors and variables that can be compared to available data from China. Each one is based on a suite of climate transition scenarios from Chinese and international institutions. In this second annual edition of the outlook report in November 2023, we reassess China’s progress towards the country’s climate commitments and towards emissions pathways aligned with the Paris Agreement goals. 

Key finding - among others:
Emissions rebound
China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions rebounded forcefully in 2023. The emissions increase was not reflective of a structural trend but rather caused by two extraordinary factors: a collapse in hydropower generation caused by the historically low rains that drove up coal-fired power generation. The re-opening of the economy after almost three years of zero-COVID-19 policies caused a rebound, particularly in oil consumption. In addition, energy and materials demand for manufacturing clean energy and clean transportation technologies offset much of the fall in demand from the real estate sector ...

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