China's Climate Change Performance Worsening

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China has slid down the annual Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), a measure of a country’s climate protection efforts, due to its rising emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). China ranked 29th out of 53 countries in 2006 but has since dropped to 54th out of 56 in the 2007 update. It now sits just behind the United States and ahead of Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. The 2007 index was released jointly by the nongovernmental organizations Germanwatch and Climate Action Network-Europe (CAN-Europe) at the World Climate Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, on November 14.

“Although China has a really positive climate policy, its strong emission trend brings it down,” said Mattias Duwe, director of CAN-Europe. Yu Jie, with the Beijing office of Greenpeace, observed that the results should be a spark for action. “I do not think it is fair to compare China’s performance with that of industrialized countries. But the country needs to take action to curb CO2 emissions. It should strike a balance between global environmental considerations and its national interests.” Yu noted that the index did not take into consideration China’s newly issued policy of cutting energy consumption by 20 percent per unit of GDP in the next five years.

The CCPI, launched in early 2006, aims to introduce greater transparency and comparability into international climate policy. Seven European countries, led by Sweden, made the index’s top 10 in the 2007 update, together with three rapidly industrializing countries: Argentina, Brazil, and India. In general, big emitters were not moving forward and even took steps back on climate protection, according to the assessment. Even those countries that have made it into the upper ranks were progressing rather slowly. “If climate change protection were an Olympic Discipline, no country would make it to the medal ranks,” CAN-Europe’s Duwe observed.

The index compares the climate change mitigation efforts of 56 industrialized and rapidly developing countries, which together generate 90 percent of global carbon emissions. It offers a means of comparison by considering not just a country’s quantitative emissions, but also trends in specific sectors like electricity, aviation, and road transport, as well as international and domestic mitigation policies. The index is based on emissions data collected by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and on a more qualitative study. The IEA recently released a report saying China would surpass the United States to become the world’s biggest CO2 emitter in 2009, releasing 5.8 billion tons of the greenhouse gas.

The index’s creators note that changes in policies can help address rising climate concerns and improve a country’s overall ranking. If the United States, currently ranked among the bottom five, were to exercise an international climate policy stance as progressive as the United Kingdom’s, it would move up more than 30 places, said Christoph Bals, political director of Germanwatch.

Hua Zhang is a reporter from Beijing.

Outside contributions to China Watch reflect the views of the author, and are not necessarily the views of the Worldwatch Institute.

Outside contributions to China Watch reflect the views of the author, and are not necessarily the views of the Worldwatch Institute.