China's carbon mitigation strategies: Enough?

As the largest CO₂ emitter in the world, China has made great achievements in carbon mitigation over the past eight years (2005–2013). Through a comprehensive and detailed overview of China's carbon mitigation strategies, this paper presents China's carbon mitigation achievements and strategies, including adjustment to the industrial structure, saving energy, optimizing energy structure, increasing forest carbon sinks, building foundational capacity, innovating technologies and practicing mitigation efforts in localities and sectors. Having been in place for some years already, the results of many of these measures and policies are now plateauing. China is facing challenges including inevitable emissions growth, shrinking of mitigation potential from technological progress, difficulty in further adjusting the industrial structure and economic development mode, continued dominance of coal in the energy mix, local governments’ reluctance to adopt measures to reduce carbon emissions, etc. Through policy diagnosis it is found that the root causes of these problems and challenges are the facts that policy-making is done primarily on the production side and there is an absence of co-benefits in the decision-making process. Therefore, it is recommended that translating mitigation targets to the consumption level and mainstreaming mitigations’ co-benefits into decision-making processes are needed to quickly enhance the results of mitigation work in China. - Highlights: • Key aspects of China's carbon mitigation strategies were outlined. • China's carbon mitigation achievements were summarized. • Challenges to meet further mitigation were investigated. • Strategic suggestions to quickly enhance China's mitigation ambition were given