Evaluation and Implication of the Policies towards China’s Carbon Neutrality

Abstract

China announced it will achieve a carbon emission peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 to fulfill its international obligations and mitigate climate risk. Related activities and polices were introduced in several sectors before this announcement. The performance and outcome of these activities provide necessary a priori knowledge for the designation and optimization of future policies. In this study, a comprehensive evaluation covering major sectors based on multisource data is proposed. The results show that although China is the largest CO2 emitter for the current stage, the increasing rate of carbon emissions has been significantly mitigated since the 2010s. This reduction in emissions can be accelerated by the carbon-trading scheme in pilot regions. As a substitution for fossil energy, there have been tens of thousands of increases in wind turbines and photovoltaic plants in the past decade. Additionally, an enhancement of the terrestrial carbon sink was detected by time-series remote sensing data. The results of this study demonstrate that China’s carbon activities in the past decade have received reasonable outcomes, which will benefit the optimization of related government policies. The improved legislation and policies of China can strengthen the regulation of emissions while promoting the quantity and quality of carbon sinks. At the same time, the improvement of the carbon emissions trading mechanism, especially the establishment of a marketing regulation mechanism, can significantly motivate interest-related communities and industries to abort high-carbon emissions and ensure the implementation of carbon neutrality in the future.