When the UN climate talks resume next week in Durban, South Africa, all eyes will be on China, the world’s biggest carbon emitter and second-largest economy.
But as negotiators try to hammer out an agreement, they may be banging heads together for little reward – because China has already decided exactly what it is going to do.
China sometimes gets blamed by Western negotiators for the failure of the talks thus far to produce any concrete agreements since Kyoto was hammered out in 1997. Chinese negotiators reject this criticism, saying that China as a developing country should not have to commit to the same reductions as developed countries, and pointing to the success of China’s self-imposed targets for energy efficiency and carbon reductions.