China’s carbon dioxide emissions are likely to peak by 2025 — and may even have done so already — according to a new paper that suggests the country’s economic slowdown and rapid adoption of renewable energy mean previous projections of China’s emissions peak are far too pessimistic.
“The major problem with current models of China’s emissions is that most of them do not pay attention to change in the structure and growth of China’s economic output,” said Fergus Green of the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute, co-author with Lord Stern of the LSE paper to be published this week in the journal Climate Policy.
The study assumes that under a “high growth scenario”, annual economic growth will be just 6 per cent rate for the coming decade — compared with an average of more than 10 per cent in the first decade of this century.