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Global coal plant projects down 76% since 2015

Posted on by dishanth
Global coal plant projects down 76% since 2015

The global pipeline of new coal plant projects has shrunk 76 per cent since 2015, a new analysis shows, putting many countries in a good position to carry out UN Secretary General António Guterres’s call for no new coal investment.

“The economics of coal have become increasingly uncompetitive in comparison to renewable energy, while the risk of stranded assets has increased. Governments can now act with confidence to commit to ‘no new coal’,” reports climate think tank E3G in its analysis.

Based on findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), worldwide coal use will need to fall by around four-fifths during the current decade to keep average global warming below 1.5°C. The International Energy Agency says advanced economies will need to cut off coal by 2030, followed by a full global cessation by 2040.

For this to happen, “a pivotal first step is ensuring no new coal-fired power stations are built,” say Leo Roberts, E3G’s research manager for fossil fuel transitions, and Christine Shearer, program director at Global Energy Monitor, in a guest post for Carbon Brief.

To date, say the authors, 44 world governments have committed to stopping new construction of coal projects, and another 33 have cancelled their project pipelines. Seven other countries have no plans to develop new coal at all.

Only five OECD countries are considering building new coal, and projects in four of those five are not expected to come through. For the fifth country—Turkey—“fears of the impact of a potential European carbon border adjustment mechanism and climate-exacerbated wildfires are increasing pressure to cancel the country’s remaining pipeline and explore alternatives,” says Roberts and Shearer.

In China, which accounts for more than half of the world’s planned coal projects, coal capacity has scaled back 74 per cent since 2015. All the other non-OECD countries have reduced their collective pre-construction pipeline by 77 per cent.

In all, “the shift in coal dynamics means that fewer and fewer countries have new coal plants under development—and an increasing list are making this into a formal ‘no new coal’ commitment,” the authors write.

Just 37 countries have remaining pre-construction pipeline projects, and 16 of them only have one project each. In all, more than four-fifths of the planned coal plants can be found in just six countries: China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Turkey, and Bangladesh.

“Because the global distribution of proposed power plants is highly concentrated, firm commitments to ‘no new coal’ by just these six countries would remove 82 per cent of the world’s remaining pipeline, should such pledges be forthcoming,” say Roberts and Shearer.

Although they host a concentrated percentage of the world’s remaining pre-construction coal projects, several within this handful of countries are especially vulnerable to climate change, despite historically contributing only modestly to global emissions. The report from E3G calls on the international community to support these countries in moving away from coal through public and private clean energy finance.

“COP 26 will be a key moment for OECD and EU members and China to demonstrate that such support is available now for all countries that are willing to shift from dirty coal to clean energy,” says E3G in its report.

This story was published with permission from The Energy Mix.

 

Shanghai leads way in China’s carbon transition

Posted on by dishanth
Shanghai leads way in China’s carbon transition

Somewhere on the eastern side of Shanghai’s Chongming Island, 300,000 solar panels lie over rows and rows of aquaculture ponds. The island’s first solar–aquaculture project started providing power to the grid late last year.

Soon after, in January, Shanghai announced it would work to achieve peak carbon during the 14th Five Year Plan period (2021–25). The district of Chongming went a step further, saying it would explore the possibility of achieving carbon neutrality. Now, more and more solar power facilities are popping up here.

Chongming, a network of rice fields, wetlands and rivers, is regarded as Shanghai’s green energy powerhouse. By the end of 2020, it had 500 megawatts of renewable energy capacity installed, exporting what isn’t used locally to the rest of Shanghai or neighbouring Jiangsu province.

But Shanghai, a megacity of 24 million people, has little space left on which to develop renewable energy, hampering the prospects for more ambitious decarbonisation of its energy sources.

As one of China’s most developed cities, Shanghai faces the same challenges the rest of the country does in achieving peak carbon and carbon neutrality: rejigging the energy mix and cutting industrial emissions.

But it must also tackle emissions from transportation and buildings, issues faced in the “consumer cities” of more developed nations. As such, it is leading the way for China’s future low-carbon transition.

 

Taking the lead on peak carbon

Last September, China committed to peak carbon by 2030, and carbon neutrality by 2060. To this end, the central government is encouraging local governments to hit peak carbon early where possible, with local action plans for reaching peak carbon due at the end of the year.

According to rough figures put forward in the media based on local 14th Five Year Plan documents published early this year, almost 100 cities or regions have said they will reach peak carbon early. These include Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin and Suzhou.

Since 2010, China has launched 87 low-carbon city pilot projects. These have explored routes to low-carbon development by saving energy in industry and limiting emissions from buildings, transportation and agriculture.

There have been no official announcements, but research by the Energy Foundation China indicates 23 provinces (including centrally administered municipalities such as Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin) have reached, or are close to reaching, peak carbon. They account for 80 percent of national emissions. Emissions are still growing in seven provinces, including Fujian and Jiangxi in the east, and Guizhou and Xinjiang in the west.

Zou Ji, president of Energy Foundation China, said at a recent seminar that those localities already at peak carbon could be divided into two types.

The first is experiencing a population decline and weak economic growth. More common is the second, where the economy is more developed, the industrial and energy structures are more advanced, and natural resources, such as sunshine and wind, are more favorable to low-carbon development.

Regions that are approaching peak carbon mostly rely on traditional drivers of growth or energy-hungry heavy industry, but do have the means to improve the industrial and energy mix in order to reach peak carbon.

Meanwhile, emissions are still growing in places with unfavorable natural resource endowments, such as abundant coal, and undeveloped economies.

The Energy Foundation China’s analysis found Shanghai’s emissions from energy activities have already peaked. That matches up with findings from Peking University’s Institute of Energy. But modelling by other academics has found that if Shanghai’s existing policies are enforced, the city’s carbon emissions will plateau between 2018 and 2024, and only then start to fall.

If energy structure and intensity targets are tightened up, that fall could be brought forward to 2022.

 

Adjusting the energy structure

Shanghai aims to have renewables account for 8 percent of its energy mix by 2025, compared to 1.6 percent in 2019. One expert who took part in the drafting of Shanghai’s peak carbon action plan said the city is short of land and even if all available space for solar power is used – including all rooftops – it would still be only a tiny fraction of what is needed.

Coal still accounted for 31 percent of Shanghai’s energy consumption in 2020, and the energy mix needs more work if the city is to hit peak carbon. The city has published a range of documents over the last few years indicating it will end its reliance on coal, with a cap on coal consumption. Meanwhile, the city is also working to replace local coal power generation with renewable generation located elsewhere in China, and to increase the use of natural gas.

 

Looking at the emissions curve, we can see that Shanghai has already started to decouple its carbon footprint from economic growth.

Zhu Dajian, director, Institute of Sustainable Development and Management Research, Tongji University

 

Shanghai already imports about half of its electricity, drawing on renewables in western China, such as hydropower, which help cut the city’s carbon emissions. The above-mentioned expert expects that achieving peak carbon and carbon neutrality will mean Shanghai relying more heavily on green power imports.

When drafting their peak-carbon action plans, provinces are required to factor in emissions incurred during the generation of imported power. This is to encourage power-consuming provinces in the east, such as Shanghai, to consider their energy structure as a whole, rather than simply export their pollution.

 

Shanghai: lightening up

“Looking at the emissions curve, we can see that Shanghai has already started to decouple its carbon footprint from economic growth,” Zhu Dajian, director of the Institute of Sustainable Development and Management Research at Tongji University, told China Dialogue. Shanghai has long been China’s top city in terms of GDP.

In 2018, its per-head GDP broke US$20,000, and service sector GDP has accounted for around 70 percent of the total for the last five years. These circumstances are similar to those seen when developed nations reach peak carbon.

Currently, Shanghai emits 200 million tonnes of carbon a year. Emissions from industry, transportation and buildings account for around 45 percent, 30 percent, and 25 percent of the total respectively, according to research by the World Resources Institute.

This, however, is not the pattern seen in major cities in developed nations. Zhu Dajian says cities overseas are mainly residential, with emissions coming from buildings and transportation – these are emissions arising from consumption. But Shanghai, like most of China’s cities, is still home to production.

Shanghai used to be a centre of heavy industry, until the 1990s when a push to shift to lighter and more modern industries started. The banks of the Huangpu River, which runs from north to south through the city, are lined with old industrial buildings, now refitted as fashionable art galleries and shops. The city’s 14th Five Year Plan says it will continue to turn its urban rust belt into an attraction.

Even so, cutting industrial emissions will be a tough nut to crack. Dai Xingyi, professor at Fudan University’s Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, said the city does not want to do away with all its industry: high-end manufacturing will be retained.

Over a decade ago, Beijing forced steelmaker Shougang to relocate. Shanghai, though, allowed Baogang, now Baowu Steel and China’s largest steel manufacturer, to keep operating in the city. Dirtier production lines were, however, shut down.

A number of academics told China Dialogue that Shanghai’s industrial emissions peaked as early as the 12th Five Year Plan period (2011-2015), and industrial carbon intensity in the city is lower than in many others. But that makes further decarbonisation more challenging. Shanghai will have to rely on further industrial changes and technological improvements.

 

Transportation and buildings: New challenges

Peak carbon will not be easy for the city. In developed nations, industrial emissions peaked, and then emissions from transport and buildings had to be tackled. In New York, emissions from buildings account for 70 per cent of total emissions. According to Zhu Dajian, emissions from transport and buildings can be expected to contribute a larger proportion of Shanghai’s overall emissions as incomes rise in the city.

Shanghai is building five city “sub-centres” on its outskirts. In April, the municipal government ruled that buildings in those sub-centres must use green building standards, and that ultra-low energy buildings are to be encouraged.

According to Dai Xingyi, the “greenness” of these new centres will also depend on their success in attracting people and commercial activities. Having the new buildings sit empty would be wasteful.

Research has shown that improving energy efficiency in existing buildings can bring big emissions savings. This is particularly the case for commercial buildings, where energy use is often tens of times that of government or residential buildings.

In 2009, Shanghai started monitoring energy use in some large public buildings. Today, over 2,000 buildings are covered by that monitoring scheme. On screens at monitoring centres, and online, building owners and the government can see real-time usage by key building infrastructure such as air-conditioning and lighting.

At a seminar held in April, one official involved in the city’s efforts to save energy and cut emissions said that data is “more useful than just lecturing.” The Shanghai district of Changning ranks buildings on their energy efficiency, encouraging building managers to learn from each other. Experience has shown that even without retrofitting, these methods can produce annual reductions in energy use.

Shanghai is known in China for its efficient public transport system. It has over 1,000 kilometres of subway lines either in operation or in the works, with links to the neighbouring provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang planned. The city government has repeatedly said the only solution to congestion issues is to prioritise the development of public transport.

In 2016, the city put forward a “15-minute city” plan, with the aim of having 99 percent of communities able to access the bulk of their shopping, leisure and transportation transfer points within a 15-minute walk by 2035.

 

There should be a cap. If we can’t cap vehicle numbers, how can we talk about a peak for vehicle emissions?

Zhu Hong, deputy head, Shanghai Urban and Rural Construction and Traffic Development Academy

 

Urban planning decisions can result in locked-in carbon emissions. Zhu Dajian explained that Beijing once planned to centralise urban functions while keeping residential zones on the outskirts. That resulted in longer commute times and appalling congestion.

A similar approach was taken with the early stages of the Lujiazui commercial zone in Shanghai’s Pudong district. However, the city realized that low-carbon development requires a functionally mixed urban layout, which renders more carbon reductions than technological advancements.

But Shanghai still has over four million cars on the road, the fifth-largest number of any Chinese city. Limitations on car purchases were introduced in 1994 but the city remains plagued by congestion and vehicle pollution. Those limits were relaxed last year, in response to the impact of the coronavirus, with an extra 40,000 purchases allowed.

The city government also spent big on subsidising consumers to upgrade their old vehicles to newer and more efficient internal combustion models.

Shanghai’s 14th Five Year Plan and a separate five-year plan for electric vehicles provide guidance for increasing electrification of private transport. However, no timetable is given for the phasing out of internal combustion vehicles. According to those plans, in five years 50 percent of all private vehicle purchases will be of all-electric vehicles, while all buses, government vehicles and city-centre goods vehicles will be electric.

Zhu Hong, deputy head of the Shanghai Urban and Rural Construction and Traffic Development Academy, said during a speech that more new electric vehicle purchases will slow emissions growth, but the speed with which the existing fleet is replaced will be key for reaching peak carbon.

His research has found that 74 percent of the city’s transportation emissions come from road vehicles, with the rest from river and rail transport, while over 60 percent of road vehicle emissions come from cars. He thinks the government needs to go further on purchase restrictions. Currently, there is a quota for annual car purchases but no cap on total car numbers. “There should be a cap. If we can’t cap vehicle numbers, how can we talk about a peak for vehicle emissions?”

Shanghai does not have much time to act. A number of experts told China Dialogue that one aspect of the “low-carbon development path with Chinese characteristics” that academics are proposing would mean more economic growth with lower emissions. Shanghai’s annual per-head carbon emissions are over ten tonnes, still higher than major cities in developed nations. Zhu Dajian said that Shanghai’s route to a low-carbon transition will show the way for the rest of China.

This article was originally published on China Dialogue under a Creative Commons licence.

 

 

Source Eco Business

Climate change: Biden summit to push for ‘immediate’ action

Posted on by dishanth
Climate change: Biden summit to push for ‘immediate’ action

The US will attempt to re-assert its global leadership on climate change as President Joe Biden hosts 40 leaders at a virtual summit in the White House.

It’s expected that the US will unveil an updated carbon pledge that will see their emissions nearly halved by 2030.

Ahead of the meeting, officials urged greater ambition on countries perceived as laggards on climate.

Referring to Australia, an official said “there would have to be a shift” in their approach.

President Biden has made climate change a key focus in the early days of his administration.

As well as re-joining the Paris climate agreement on his first day in office, he announced early on that he would gather around 40 world leaders for a global summit on Earth Day – 22 April.

 

President Biden rejoined the Paris agreement on his first day in office and pledged to hold a leaders summit shortly after Image Jim Watson

 

Among those attending will be China’s President Xi Jinping.

Despite serious tensions between the two countries on a host of issues, both sides seem keen to keep climate change separate from these disputes. Last weekend, the two countries issued a joint statement saying they would tackle climate “with the seriousness and urgency it demands”.

Speaking ahead of the meeting, a senior Biden administration official spoke warmly about the potential for co-operation.

“It’s quite clear that there is a distinctly shared level of ambition. Both countries see this as a crisis. Both countries see the need for action in the 2020s. Both countries see the need to work towards holding the increase in global temperatures to 1.5C,” he said.

“We certainly hope that President Xi will come to the meeting, and further elaborate on some of the additional efforts that China would choose to make. But I think we’ve got a very strong basis in the joint statement that the two countries made about the directions they seem to be moving.”

 

Protestors outside the White House hold cardboard cut outs of the leaders due to meet Source Reuters

 

But for other countries who have been slow to embrace action on climate change, the Biden team were less effusive.

Both Brazil and Australia’s sceptical approach to the issue had found favour in the Trump White House. That’s no longer the case.

“At the moment, I think that our colleagues in Australia recognise that there’s going to have to be a shift,” one official said.

“It’s insufficient to follow the existing trajectory, and hope that they will be on a course to deep decarbonisation, and getting to net zero emissions by mid-century.”

Speaking about Brazil, the same official said: “The expectation for all countries is that the ambition has to be increased immediately.”

But while the US is talking strongly about ambition, the proof of change for many observers will be in their new carbon-cutting pledge for 2030 they are expected to announce at the summit.

 

Despite some earlier uncertainty, China President Xi Jinping will address the US summit

 

This will require some clever footwork from the US. They will have to go for a figure that is scientifically credible but also politically achievable.

While the Democrats have a majority in the House of Representatives, the Senate is essentially deadlocked, making the passage of new climate legislation rather tricky.

“It seems to me that President Biden is in a bit of a bind, and he has to deal with the Congress that he has,” said Samantha Gross from the Brookings Institution.

“But I believe that Congress, particularly the Republicans, haven’t really kept up with increasing concern among the American public about climate.”

For some in the international community, even the mooted 50% cut in emissions won’t be going far enough.

 

A coal train snakes through the landscape in the US – predictions are that coal use will increase this year as the economy recovers from the pandemic Source Getty Images

 

“The US should cut at least 55% from 2005 levels by 2030 to inspire others to raise their ambitions,” said Quamrul Chowdhury, from Bangladesh and a climate negotiator for the Least Developed countries group.

“Mitigation is the best adaptation and major economies must cutback emissions quickly and steeply.”

The US pledge will undoubtedly be the headline, whatever its size – but there are also expected to be new steps announced by a number of countries.

“The three that I think are most likely beside the US to step up at this summit are Canada, Japan and South Korea,” said Helen Mountford from the World Resources Institute (WRI).

 

Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison has been criticised for slow action on climate Source Tracy Nearmy

 

“China… would be fantastic, but I think [we[ quite likely might wait longer, I wouldn’t expect it at this time.”

She added: “India is a real question mark, but whether they’re going to announce either a net zero target or enhanced plan, I would say there’s less of a chance of that.”

For those who were involved in the negotiations that led to the Paris agreement in 2015, the key thing this week is not to derail the discussions at the first hurdle.

This is the first big climate meeting of a critical year that will culminate in a gathering of around 200 world leaders in Glasgow in November at COP26.

“I think that for the US leaders summit to be a success, we need to have the 40 leaders present and expressing their willingness to reach strong agreement by Glasgow,” said Remy Rioux, who was a negotiator for France during the Paris talks.

“And also for the US to demonstrate that they are back, and that they are back as convincingly and strongly as possible.”

 

 

By Matt McGrath
Environment correspondent

Source BBC

Asian companies claim they are going net-zero — but are their targets realistic, ambitious or greenwash?

Posted on by dishanth
Asian companies claim they are going net-zero — but are their targets realistic, ambitious or greenwash?

The race is on for the business world to figure out how to sustain economic growth and go carbon-free.

The penny seems to be dropping that avoiding climate action comes with financial risks. Last October, 200 of the world’s largest multinational companies said they would achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Among them were Asian companies in sin industries linked with spotty environmental records such as Sinopec and Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL). Chevron, Philip Morris and DuPont were also among those that made pledges.

By 2050, climate change will shrink the global economy by 3 per cent as drought, flooding, crop failure and infrastructure damage become more severe — unless drastic action is taken to bend the curve on global warming, according to a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The Covid-19 pandemic — which has been called a “dress rehearsal” for climate change — has accelerated the urgency to mitigate the impacts of climate change which cost the global economy billions every year.

“Suddenly, corporates have realised that if we’re going for a 1.5 degrees Celsius cap on global warming [the goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change], we have to hit net zero by 2030. It’ll be very expensive to decarbonise any later,” said Malavika Bambawale, Asia Pacific head of sustainability solutions at Engie Impact, a decarbonisation consultancy.

 

“What is the cost of not decarbonising? That is the question businesses should really be asking themselves.”
Pratima Divgi, director, Hong Kong, Asean, Oceania, CDP

 

Western businesses have led the way, with the likes of Microsoft saying it will make “the biggest commitment in our history” by removing all of the carbon it has put into the atmosphere since its founding in 1975. Asian companies have been slower to commit. “A lot of Asian companies are further down the supply chain, so they can hide for longer,” says Bambawale.

But climate action in a region that produces more than half of global emissions is cranking up. Of the 1,200 or so firms that have signed up to the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which helps companies cut their emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, 250 Asian companies have set carbon-cutting targets or are in the process of getting targets approved — a 57 per cent increase between 2019 and 2020. Forty-eight of those 250 firms have aligned their business models with the Paris agreement. 

“From a small base, corporate decarbonisation is growing in Asia Pacific,” says Pratima Divgi, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand director at CDP, a carbon disclosure non-proft that co-developed the SBTi. Companies that have signed up to the SBTi include Hong Kong real estate firm Swire Properties, Chinese computer giant Lenovo, and Malaysian textile firm Tai Wah Garments Industry.

National-level policy commitments, like China, Korea and Japan’s net-zero declarations over the past six months have set the tone for Asian corporate decarbonisation. Competition is helping. Australian supermarket chain Coles declared a 2050 net zero target six months after rival Woolworths did the same, and Singaporean real estate firm City Developments Limited (CDL) made a net zero pledge the week after competitor Frasers Property. Gojek and Grab are racing to be the first ride-hailing app in Southeast Asia to declare a decarbonisation target.

“Now that market leaders such as CDL have made net-zero commitments, it will be harder for their competitors to sit and wait,” says Bambawale.

Malaysian oil and gas giant Petronas announced in October that it would hit net-zero by 2050, a month after PetroChina, the region’s largest oil company, said it would be “near-zero” by mid-century.

 

Aspiration versus reality

But questions hang over how Asia’s big-polluters will realise their declared targets. Ensuring the big emitters share detailed plans and a budget to support their carbon neutral declarations is key for accountability.

PetroChina’s announcement came with “frustratingly little detail”, commented renewables consultancy Wood MacKenzie. The oil giant aims to spend just 1-2 per cent of its total budget on renewable energy between now and 2025. This compares to Italian oil major Eni’s planned 20 per cent of total spend on renewables by 2023 and BP’s 33 per cent by 2030.

Petronas’ own 2050 net-zero pledge is an “aspiration” and not a science-based target that aligns the firm with the Paris Agreement.

“Aspirational targets can only go so far — science-based targets also need to clearly allocate interim short- to medium-term targets to work out what this transformation means to your business and value chain,” says Divgi.

Setting a science-based carbon reduction target takes time. Singapore-based transport firm ComfortDelGro has given itself two years to set science-based goals, but the company avoided giving a carbon reduction timeline in its announcement earlier this month.

Other companies are also being selective with the information they make public. This could be because they do not want to reveal the extent to which they intend on decarbonising, or because they do not have a plan yet. CDL has pledged that it will be net-zero by 2030 — 20 years ahead of competitor Frasers Property — but has declined to give further detail on how it will meet this target.

CDL’s carbon commitment is limited to its wholly-owned assets and developments under its direct control, while Frasers Property is aiming to remove emissions from its entire value chain.

 

Why carbon dieting is difficult

For major emitters like oil and gas firms, decarbonising means transforming their business model without going out of business. Petronas told Eco-Business that meeting its 2050 target “won’t be easy”, and would require the company to “re-strategise how we do our business, with the focus no longer being on profitability or production capacity alone”.

Petronas plans include hydrocarbon flaring and venting, developing low and zero carbon fuels, capturing emissions and investing in nature-based solutions. It also plans to cap emissions to 49.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent for its Malaysia operations by 2024, and increase renewable energy capacity to 3,000 megawatts by the same year.

Meeting its target would “requires us to strike an equitable balance between providing low carbon solutions while still ensuring energy security and business profitability,” said the company’s group health, safety, security and environment vice-president, Dzafri Sham Ahmad.

But removing the carbon from a company’s operations is no longer deemed enough. The indirect emissions that occur in the entire value chain — known as scope 3 emissions — are becoming the new business imperative. A new report from CDP found that emissions from a company’s supply chain are on average 11.4 times higher than its operational emissions – double previous estimates. ExxonMobil’s scope 3 emissions from the use of its products exceed the national annual emissions of Canada, it was revealed in January.

 

“Achieving this aspiration will require us to re-strategise how we do our business, with the focus no longer being on profitability or production capacity alone.”

Dzafri Sham Ahmad, vice-president, group health, safety, security and environment, Petronas

 

Electric vehicle makers such as Telsa are now asking questions about the emissions of their nickel suppliers while computer giant Apple wants to source low-carbon semiconductor chips. But tackling scope 3 emissions is tricky. For instance, how do Singapore construction companies reduce the imported carbon of building materials sourced from China, where electricity is generated from coal? And how does a building owner persuade its tenants to turn down the air-conditioning?

“Reducing scope 3 emissions looks easy enough from the top down. But for people in the field operating the assets it can be a nightmare,” says J. Sarvaiya, an engineer who’s an expert in decarbonisation.

Balancing the carbon books by sourcing renewable energy is also difficult in a region where fossil fuels are still the dominant power source, and where a diversity of regulatory landscapes has made scaling renewables hard and where prices remain high in places. This has led Asian companies to focus on reducing energy consumption first, before looking at procuring renewables, notes Bambawale.

But energy capping is not easy in a high-growth region with escalating energy needs. Southeast Asia’s energy consumption is growing by 4 per cent a year — twice the rate of the rest of the world — and much of that demand comes through cooling as global temperatures rise. Some 30 per cent of a business’s energy bill in this region goes on cooling, says Bambawale.

 

Offset or cut?

Facing so many challenges, it’s tempting for businesses to buy their way to net-zero. Carbon offsets, where companies fund projects that capture or store greenhouse gas emissions to offset their own, are becoming an increasingly popular path to carbon neutrality. Singapore state investor Temasek was one of Asia’s first companies to neutralise the carbon emissions of its operations last year, and did so primarily by buying carbon offsets. Petronas is also relying on offsets as part of its ‘measure, reduce, offset’ net-zero drive.

But offsets are drawing growing scepticism because they enable businesses to carry on as usual, without reducing their actual footprint. “Many companies find that it’s cheaper to reach net-zero by purchasing offsets. It may cost more to replace old technology with more efficient kit than buying offsets,” says Sarvaiya.

Offsets are a necessary piece of the decarbonisation puzzle — but the quality of offset is key, says Bambawale. Companies should ensure that an offset is additional—that is, the carbon reduction would not have happened without the company’s effort. It should also have permanent, rather than temporary, impact. And it should not cause any sort of environmental or social harm. Proving all of that is difficult. “Companies could spend years checking and validating that an offset is actually happening,” says Bambawale.

Offsets will get more problematic the warmer the world gets, Sarvaiya points out. The ability of plants to absorb carbon declines in a warmer world, so more trees will have to be planted to balance the carbon books. Buying renewable energy faces a similar issue. Every one degree increase of surface temperature reduces the efficiency of solar panels by 0.5 per cent.

Companies are also looking to emerging technologies to help them hit carbon goals. In Singapore, concrete producer Pan-United and Keppel Data Centres are part of a consortium that is banking on carbon capture, use and storage technology that won’t be online for another five to 10 years to reduce the carbon impact of the city-state’s oil refining, petrochemicals and chemicals sectors.

Heavy-emitting sectors such as steel production, aviation and shipping have high hopes for hydrogen power, which is considered the missing piece of the renewables puzzle. But questions over cost and transportation make hydrogen a fuel for the future for now. “Moonshot ideas should be the last step,” says Bambawale.

 

Why net-zero is not just hot air

In Southeast Asia, where governments have shown little interest in decarbonising their economies in their post-pandemic recovery plans, there is less incentive for businesses to cut their carbon footprints amid the struggle to stay afloat.

But a wave of commitments to decarbonisation in the past 18 months will likely lead to more. Scores of businesses have signed up for science-based targets during the pandemic, which has played a part in pushing others towards net-zero, says Divgi, adding that a Southeast Asian bank recently committed to SBTi whose suppliers’ emissions were 400 times its own.

Another indicator of interest in corporate climate action is the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), a global framework for companies to disclose the financial risks they face from climate change. CDP has seen a 20 per cent increase in TCFD disclosures in Asia over the last year, Divgi notes.

More companies are trying to assess the financial implications of the transition to a low-carbon economy, and the more progressive companies have recognised that calculating climate risk is not a reporting exercise, it’s a strategic one, says Divgi.

“We’re not saying that it [decarbonising] is without problems. There’s a huge level of transformation involved, but climate change presents both a financial and an existential challenge for many businesses,” she says.

“What is the cost of not decarbonising — that is the question that businesses should really be asking themselves.”

 

 

By Robin Hicks

Source Eco Business

China’s Five-Year Plan ‘Underwhelming’ on Climate

Posted on by dishanth
China’s Five-Year Plan ‘Underwhelming’ on Climate

On Friday, China set out an economic blueprint for the next five years, which was expected to substantiate the goal set out last fall by President Xi Jinping for the country to reach net-zero emissions before 2060 and hit peak emissions by 2030.

While the plan calls for a “major push” on clean energy development, a few aspects have left climate experts with questions about how exactly the world’s largest emitter will hit its stated climate goals. For example, the plan did not include a ban on new coal projects, nor did it set a “carbon cap” to define what peak emissions will be, instead setting a carbon intensity target that is the same as in the previous five-ear plan.

However, some are hopeful that the government will announce more detailed regulations on carbon-intensive construction and manufacturing industries later this year, and that more details will be laid out in an upcoming separate five-year plan for the energy sector. Fan Dai, director of the California-China Climate Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, told Quartz that the plan is “simply aggregating existing targets from last year.”

Dai added that “[t]here’s a lot of room for further development and ambition, especially around those targets that were missing that we hoped would be included.”

 

As reported by The Guardian:

China will reduce its “emissions intensity” – the amount of CO2 produced per unit of GDP – by 18% over the period 2021 to 2025, but this target is in line with previous trends, and could lead to emissions continuing to increase by 1% a year or more. Non-fossil fuel energy is targeted to make up 20% of China’s energy mix, leaving plenty of room for further expansion of the country’s coal industry.

Swithin Lui, of the Climate Action Tracker and NewClimate Institute, said: “[This is] underwhelming and shows little sign of a concerted switch away from a future coal lock-in. There is little sign of the change needed [to meet net zero].”

Zhang Shuwei, chief economist at Draworld Environment Research Centre, said: “As the first five-year plan after China committed to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, the 14th five-year plan was expected to demonstrate strong climate ambition. However, the draft plan presented does not seem to meet the expectations. The international community expected China’s climate policy to ‘jump,’ but in reality it is still crawling.”

 

 

Source Eco Watch

Southeast Asia’s $200+ Billion Renewables Opportunity

Posted on by dishanth
Southeast Asia’s $200+ Billion Renewables Opportunity

There is a $205-billion opportunity in renewable energy for Southeast Asia from which China, Japan, and South Korea could benefit as the biggest energy lenders to smaller countries in the region, Greenpeace has said in a new report.

“These three East Asian countries are top global energy investors, with established ties in Southeast Asia. But coal finance is drying up and banks are struggling to get a grip on clean energy finance. The climate crisis depends heavily on the flexibility and ingenuity of East Asian finance. And state-backed public development banks once again need to play the trailblazer role to engage new markets,” according to Insung Lee, project manager of Greenpeace Japan’s climate and energy team.

Southeast Asian countries, according to the report, will need investments of some $125.1 billion for solar energy over the next ten years, as well as $48.1 billion for wind energy, assuming they want to pursue the renewable energy path instead of sticking to fossil fuels. And China, Japan, and South Korea are in a position to convince them to choose the renewable energy path by investing in solar and wind rather than fossil fuels.

However, the report notes that the three East Asian powerhouses are also large exporters of coal infrastructure and lenders for coal power plants to their neighbors in Southeast Asia. This has to change if they are to reap the benefits of the nascent renewable energy financing market in the region, the report says.

“East Asian finance will be as important for renewable energy in Southeast Asia as it was for coal. Over the past two decades, we’ve seen East Asian banks skew the margins towards coal to keep the fossil fuel profitable despite ballooning financial risk. Over the next decade, we’ll see them apply the same ingenuity to unlock renewable energy from the restrictions of their own financial framework,” Greenpeace Japan’s Lee also said.

 

By Charles Kennedy

Source Oilprice.com

 

Climate change: Temperature analysis shows UN goals ‘within reach’

Posted on by dishanth
Climate change: Temperature analysis shows UN goals ‘within reach’

The Climate Action Tracker group looked at new climate promises from China and other nations, along with the carbon plans of US President-elect Joe Biden.

These commitments would mean the rise in world temperatures could be held to 2.1C by the end of this century.

Previous estimates indicated up to 3C of heating, with disastrous impacts.

But the experts are worried the long-term optimism is not matched by short-term plans to cut CO2.

For more than a decade, researchers from the Climate Action Tracker have kept a close eye on what countries’ collective carbon-cutting pledges mean for our warming world.

After the failed Copenhagen summit in 2009, the group estimated that global temperatures would rise by 3.5C by the end of this century.

 

Source: Climate Action Tracker Source: BBC

 

But the creation in 2015 of the Paris climate agreement, which was designed to avoid dangerous warming of the Earth, made a considerable impact. As a result of the international deal, countries slowly started to switch away from fossil fuels.

In September this year, the group concluded that the world was heading for warming of around 2.7C by 2100.

This figure was still far above the 2C goal contained in the wording of the Paris pact, and nowhere near the more challenging 1.5C target that scientists endorsed as the threshold to destructive warming in 2018.

Their new “optimistic analysis” now suggests a rise of 2.1C by 2100.

 

Xi Jinping remotely addressing the UN on the question of climate change. Source: REUTERS

 

So what’s really changed?

The past three months have seen some key developments.

In September, China’s President Xi Jinping told the UN that his country will reach net zero emissions by 2060, and that its emissions will peak before 2030. According to the CAT researchers, this could reduce warming by 0.2 to 0.3C by the end of the century.

Japan and South Korea have both followed suit, pledging to reach net zero by 2050. South Africa and Canada have also announced their own net zero targets.

The other significant change is the election of Joe Biden in the US.

 

Source: Climate Action Tracker / Source: BBC

 

Tackling climate change is a major part of his agenda. He has promised to bring the US to net zero emissions by 2050. That move would reduce global temperatures by 0.1C by 2100.

“We now have north of 50% of global emissions covered by big countries with a zero emissions by mid-century goal,” said Bill Hare from Climate Analytics, who helped lead the Climate Action Tracker analysis.

“When you add all that up, along with what a whole bunch of other countries are doing, then you move the temperature dial from around 2.7C to really quite close to two degrees.”

“It’s still a fair way off from the Paris Agreement target, but it is a really major development,” he told BBC News.

 

President-elect Joe Biden has selected former US Secretary of State John Kerry to be his climate envoy. Source: REUTERS

 

Potential difficulties

The CAT researchers say they have taken a fairly conservative approach but they readily acknowledge that their optimistic analysis comes with some major caveats.

The biggest problem as they see it, is that the near-term plans to cut carbon by 2030 are just not up to the job.

“Countries have not yet adjusted their short-term actions to be on a pathway towards the long-term target,” said Niklas Höhne, from the NewClimate Institute, who also works on the Climate Action Tracker.

“Long-term targets are easier, they are far away. But short-term actions are happening right now and they affect citizens, they affect voters. And that’s why this is much more difficult,” he told BBC News.

 

Politicians have been under pressure to act on climate change from protestors, including Greta Thunberg. Source: REUTERS

 

The countries that have signed up to the Paris agreement are expected to lodge new carbon-cutting plans for 2030 by the end of this year.

It’s expected that a number will do so, including the UK and the EU.

But there are several countries who are still reluctant to set goals, and many poorer nations are still looking to invest in coal.

“There are countries that still remain bad actors, including Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Australia, Russia, and a few others,” said Bill Hare.

“And we also have a pipeline of coal plants in the region where I’m working now in Asia. It has not collapsed, it has not gone away, so yes, there’s much to be concerned about. And there’s much that can go wrong.”

 

A hydrogen-powered train – the green form of the gas could help decarbonise transport

 

What about the response to Covid-19?

According to observers, the response of countries to the Covid crisis is a huge opportunity to focus their short-term spending on renewable energy and increased decarbonisation.

“The pandemic opened a window to not only get countries to outline their long-term goal, but to actually move onto the right path so that they can actually achieve the long term goal,” said Dr Maisa Rojas, who is the director of the Center for Climate and Resilience Research at the University of Chile in Santiago.

“Are we going to harness that opportunity? My impression is that many, including the EU, are harnessing it.”

 

 

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent

Source: BBC

Has ‘geoengineering’ arrived in China?

Posted on by dishanth
Has ‘geoengineering’ arrived in China?

In August, a team of researchers climbed up to Sichuan’s Dagu glacier and carried out an experiment. By covering 500 square metres with a geotextile cloth 5-8mm thick, they hoped to lessen the glacier’s summer melt.

The experiment, a joint undertaking between the State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Science (SKLCS) and the Dagu Glacier Scenic Area Bureau, drew media attention. The local Chengdu Commercial Daily described it as China’s first attempt to use “geoengineering” to reduce glacier melting, saying that if the results were good the approach would be optimised and applied elsewhere.

But despite the enthusiasm in the media, geoengineering is controversial.

In its 5th Assessment Report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defined geoengineering as “a broad set of methods and technologies operating on a large scale that aim to deliberately alter the climate system in order to alleviate the impacts of climate change.”

These techniques are often divided into two broad categories: solar radiation management (SRM), which aims to temporarily cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space; and carbon dioxide removal (CDR), the physical removal and permanent sequestration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, creating “negative emissions”. One example of CDR is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS.

Commercial CDR trials are underway, but controversy over governance and unknown climate risks have prevented deployment of SRM approaches.

Does the Chinese media’s warm reception for the Dagu glacier experiment mean the “geoengineering” concept has arrived in China, and may even be rolled out at scale?

 

Defining geoengineering

Wang Feiteng, deputy director of the SKLCS, told China Dialogue that the experiment was based on his work on retaining snow for the Beijing Winter Olympics Organising Committee, and that this research developed out of his own interest.

With global warming worsening, China’s glaciers have been shrinking more rapidly since the 1990s. A 2014 survey found that 82 per cent of them had shrunk since the 1950s, losing 18 per cent of their total surface area.

Some want to use radical interventions to control and combat the impacts of climate change. But the climate is complex, and some approaches may have cross-border consequences for agriculture, society and economies. As yet there are no international mechanisms for governing these risks.

There are precedents for glacier-wrapping. Swiss people living near the Rhône glacier have been doing it for more than a decade. Geotextiles are laid over the Presena glacier in northern Italy after every skiing season – with coverage now reaching 100,000 square metres. These efforts are made by businesses or local communities in an attempt to protect skiing and tourism.

John Moore, chief scientist at Beijing Normal University’s College of Global Change and Earth System and Professor at Lapland University, Finland, thinks experiments on the scale of Dagu glacier shouldn’t be classed as geoengineering:

“Small glacier projects are not geoengineering because they don’t have global impacts,” he says. Moore led a five-year Chinese research project, up until December 2019, looking into the potential impacts of geoengineering, with a budget of 14 million yuan (US$2 million).

He cited a recent experiment at the Great Barrier Reef as an example. In March, an Australian team used a modified turbine to spray salt water into the air over Broadhurst Reef, off Townsville, Queensland. The salt mixes with low-altitude cloud, which then becomes more reflective, sending more sunlight back into space and cooling the ocean below. This “marine cloud brightening” SRM technique is relatively cost-effective. If applied at a large enough scale, it could generate meaningful impacts.

In theory, changing the microclimate of the Great Barrier Reef could have a knock-on effect elsewhere. But Moore says that depends on whether these changes can be measurable and significant. He called the Australian experiment “more like an attempt at trying to preserve the status quo of a particular ecosystem”.

Moore used the idea of “leverage” to describe the relationship between climate interventions and global impacts: “You’re going to go to some sensitive part of the whole climate system and play with that in some way that it has a huge leverage.” He mentioned Pine Island and Thwaites Glacier in the Antarctic as examples, saying these glaciers are the biggest potential sources of sea-level rise over the coming two centuries, because ocean warming has destabilised them, so buttressing them could have huge benefits.

Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G), agrees that glacier-wrapping experiments like that at Dagu could have a beneficial effect – but that the broader impacts should also be studied. As glacier-wrapping probably would not affect the climate globally, it would likely not be regarded as geoengineering under most definitions.

C2G works to catalyse the creation of governance frameworks for emerging approaches to alter the climate, while taking an impartial stance on their potential deployment.

Pasztor pointed out that there are differing definitions of geoengineering, and that different actors can use the term in quite different ways, for different effects. This can create misunderstanding, which is not helpful for governance, so he prefers to use the umbrella terms carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation modification (SRM), rather than a single all-encompassing term.

He also suggests that the definition is not as important as the ultimate impact. And he notes that several small but simultaneous interventions could have a far-reaching cumulative effect.

“Even in the case of covering the glaciers, the point is not whether or not you define it as geoengineering. The point is what impact it could have, and whether it needs to be done. Glacier-wrapping may have the positive impact of ‘saving’ the glacier. But it may have some other negative impacts as well, that people haven’t discovered.”

 

Global governance challenges

Globally, some other cryosphere research is getting more attention than the Dagu experiment. For example, the Arctic Ice Project, initiated by Stanford University lecturer Leslie Field, aims to spread tiny silicon beads onto young, thin ice to increase reflectivity. This is one of only a few attempts to move SRM techniques from computer models to the real world.

Another project in the works is the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), proposed by Harvard scientists. This would see the release of small quantities of different materials (eg calcium carbonate) at an altitude of 20km, and then measuring the effects on the atmosphere and light scattering.

Models suggest that it would be quick-acting and its direct costs relatively cheap. Consequently, “stratospheric aerosol injection” is one of the most-discussed SRM technologies – but questions about who would control such technologies, and about potential adverse and unequal impacts create significant governance challenges, and have prompted some strong opposition.

Although these experiments are quite different, and are relatively small-scale, Pasztor says both require “some kind of guardrails that don’t exist, as research also needs to be regulated to follow the precautionary principle, and make sure that things happen the right way.”

Climate interventions could have unpredictable outcomes. Uneven changes in temperature or precipitation, for example, could widen regional climate differences, exacerbating food insecurity, flooding or environmental degradation. The lack of international governance means it is not possible for international society to exercise oversight of any state, company or individual that decides to apply a particular intervention.

In 2009, several scientists signed up to the Oxford Principles to try and provide guidance for geoengineering research and governance. The principles state geoengineering should be regulated as a public good, with public participation and transparency, and that governance should precede deployment.

Chen Ying, a member of the Chinese geoengineering research team led by John Moore, and a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Ecological Civilisation Institute, said that the governance-first approach should be followed, but effective implementation is difficult, as modelling, field trials and deployment all have different impacts, and experiments are carried out at a range of scales.

Moore said: “If you’re going to have any actual kind of international agreements, which really are needed, I think that you probably need to get very specific, rather than trying to have some overall kind of frame.”

Given the lack of international mechanisms, the SCoPEx project has set up an independent advisory committee to produce a governance framework and ensure research is transparent and responsible. But some have questioned if the committee is independent enough, and worry that carrying out field trials before adequate consensus has formed may lead to a relaxed attitude to risks.

Pasztor said it was not C2G’s place to comment on the governance efforts of specific projects, but said researchers have a duty to evaluate the physical and social impacts of their work, ensure transparency of plans and funding, and encourage stakeholder participation. Moore stressed that taking a diverse range of views on board is crucial, whatever governance framework is used.

The existing UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has a clear mandate for carbon removal as part of mitigation, but there is no equivalent international treaties or processes on SRM. A number of international rules on SRM are specific to certain technologies or issues, leaving an insufficient basis for global governance.

For example, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea has articles applicable only to marine cloud brightening, while the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer and the associated Montreal Protocol only focuses on potential damage to the ozone layer from aerosols.

On the form of future governance of SRM, Pasztor said: “There are many national, regional and international institutions that could have a role or would have a role to play, as well as civil society and the private sector. It’s a question of how one brings those together, and how additional institutional needs are then considered and decided.”

For example, he said, deployment of SRM would need a global atmospheric monitoring system – which the World Meteorological Organisation already has, although it would need adjustments and improvements to be suitable.

“The problem we are facing now is that most actors simply don’t know enough about these technologies, these approaches. They don’t know what is the latest science. They don’t know what are the risks and the benefits. They don’t realise what their governance challenges are. And that is so important because without that, it’s very difficult to even decide whether or not to make use of these approaches, or to make some international laws about this.” he said.

 

China’s role

The 2015-19 Chinese geoengineering research project led by John Moore was a joint undertaking by Beijing Normal University, Zhejiang University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It modelled and analysed the mechanisms and climate impacts of geoengineering, and evaluated its integrated social impacts and possible governance frameworks.

“What China has done in terms of geoengineering is very significant globally,” Moore said, describing it as a “larger and more sustained effort than people have been able to do so far internationally.” To increase the applicability of its findings, the research team tried to link its models with agricultural, economic and health outcomes. For example, what economic impact will differing levels of carbon release from Arctic permafrost have in various geoengineering or emissions scenarios?

China is vulnerable to climate disasters, and the project sparked speculation that it plans to roll out geoengineering in response. Moore said that so far, the project’s experiments are limited to computer models and the laboratory. He says China will not take action before an international consensus has formed, and covering one glacier or cloud-seeding do not count as geoengineering.

Chen Ying has noted that very few people in China are discussing such interventions, and academics and policymakers are not up to speed on the topic – and so it is too soon to talk of deployment. “If academics and the government don’t take the field seriously, it’s even harder for the public to understand it,” she said.

In China, prospects are brighter for deployment of carbon dioxide removal than solar-radiation management. In September, Xi Jinping announced at the UN General Assembly that China will achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Chen Ying thinks this will first require decarbonisation of industry and technological innovation, along with more sustainable consumption. But the huge emissions cuts needed to achieve the 1.5C warming target makes international large-scale deployment of CDR likely.

But, she warns, it takes time to develop and deploy technology. For example, more mature and economic technologies are required for the carbon capture and storage part of BECCS, as well as assurances that the carbon will not leak back into the atmosphere. Application of BECCS should also minimise the impact on the environment and properly handle its relationship with food security, water and soil conservation. “There are a lot of issues and blanks, and early research and preparation are essential.”

 

The last chance

Regardless of the impact of the Dagu glacier experiment, it reflects a determination from the scientific community to identify ways to responds to climate change. Wang Feiteng said that another glacier-covering experiment will be carried out next May to test different materials and arrangements.

Moore thinks there is also an emotional element at play in these experiments, which mean people are keen to see them go ahead. “You have to provide some kind of light or some path at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “Maybe geoengineering is something that might provide a role to provide a better future. And governments really are keen to look at that.”

Chen Ying would like to see academics and the public more open to the idea of geoengineering. “Some people think it’s all pie in the sky and not worth researching, but that’s not the case. Others think it’s too radical, but that’s not right either. And researching it doesn’t mean you support deployment. Those are different things.”

Pasztor worries that in spite of recently announced commitments of many countries to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, and more recently by China by 2060, governments on the whole still aren’t taking emission reductions or removals seriously enough, despite the world still being far off achieving the 1.5-2C goal of the Paris Agreement. He warns that it could take 10 to 15 years of international research to decide if even “quick” methods like SRM are feasible, or how they might be governed.

“And if we’re not careful, we could end up in a few years, maybe a decade or so from now, where some country or countries unilaterally decide that there is no other option left than solar radiation modification, because it seems to them a fairly cheap and fairly quick way of reducing temperatures,” he said.

“That could lead to significant problems, including with other countries that did not agree. And unfortunately, it would be terrible for the world to end up in a situation where that was the only choice left.”

This article was originally published on China Dialogue under a Creative Commons licence.

 

 

Source: Eco Business

Super-charged: How Australia’s biggest renewables project will change the energy game

Posted on by dishanth
Super-charged: How Australia’s biggest renewables project will change the energy game

Australia doesn’t yet export renewable energy. But the writing is on the wall: demand for Australia’s fossil fuel exports is likely to dwindle soon, and we must replace it at massive scale.

The proposed Asian Renewable Energy Hub (AREH) will be a huge step forward. It would eventually comprise 26,000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar energy, generated in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. Once complete, it would be Australia’s biggest renewable energy development, and potentially the largest of its type in the world.

Late last week, the federal government granted AREH “major project” status, meaning it will be fast-tracked through the approvals process. And in another significant step, the WA government this month gave environmental approval for the project’s first stage.

The mega-venture still faces sizeable challenges. But it promises to be a game-changer for Australia’s lucrative energy export business and will reshape the local renewables sector.

 

The projects promise enormous clean development opportunities for Australia’s north and will create thousands of jobs in Australia – especially in high-tech manufacturing.

 

Writing on the wall

Australia’s coal and gas exports have been growing for decades, and in 2019-20 reached almost A$110 billion. Much of this energy has fuelled Asia’s rapid growth. However, in recent weeks, two of Australia’s largest Asian energy markets announced big moves away from fossil fuels.

China adopted a target of net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2060. Japan will retire its fleet of old coal-fired generation by 2030, and will introduce legally binding targets to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

There are signs other Asian nations are also moving. Singapore has weak climate targets, but on Monday inked a deal with Australia to cooperate on low-emissions technologies.

 

Export evolution

The Asian Renewable Energy Hub (AREH) would be built across 6,500 square kilometres in the East Pilbara. The first stage involves a 10,000MW wind farm plus 5,000MW of solar generation – which the federal government says would make it the world’s largest wind and solar electricity plant.

The first stage would be capable of generating 100 terawatt-hours of renewable electricity each year. That equates to about 40 per cent of Australia’s total electricity generation in 2019. AREH recently expanded its longer term plans to 26,000MW.

The project is backed by a consortium of global renewables developers. Most energy from AREH will be used to produce green hydrogen and ammonia to be used both domestically, and for shipping to export markets. Some energy from AREH will also be exported as electricity, carried by an undersea electrical cable.

Another Australian project is also seeking to export renewable power to Asia. The 10-gigawatt Sun Cable project, backed by tech entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes, involves a solar farm across 15,000 hectares near Tennant Creek, in the Northern Territory. Power generated will supply Darwin and be exported to Singapore via a 3,800km electrical cable along the sea floor.

The export markets for both AREH and Sun Cable are there. For example, both South Korea and Japan have indicated strong interest in Australia’s green hydrogen to decarbonise their economies and secure energy supplies.

But we should not underestimate the obstacles standing in the way of the projects. Both will require massive investment. Sun Cable, for example, will cost an estimated A$20 billion to build. The Asian Renewable Energy Hub will reportedly require as much as A$50 billion.

The projects are also at the cutting edge of technology, in terms of the assembly of the solar array, the wind turbines and batteries. Transport of hydrogen by ship is still at the pilot stage, and commercially unproven. And the projects must navigate complex approvals and regulatory processes, in both Australia and Asia.

But the projects have good strategic leadership, and a clear mission to put Australian green energy exports on the map.

 

Shifting winds

Together, the AREH and Sun Cable projects do not yet make a trend. But they clearly indicate a shift in mindset on the part of investors.

The projects promise enormous clean development opportunities for Australia’s north, and will create thousands of jobs in Australia – especially in high-tech manufacturing. As we look to rebuild the economy after the Covid-19 pandemic, such stimulus will be key. All up, AREH is expected to support more than 20,000 jobs during a decade of construction, and 3,000 jobs when fully operating.

To make smart policies and investments, the federal government must have a clear view of the future global economy. Patterns of energy consumption in Asia are shifting away from fossil fuels, and Australia’s exports must move with them.

John A. Mathews is Professor Emeritus in the Macquarie Business School at Macquarie University. Elizabeth Thurbon is Scientia Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at UNSW Sydney. Hao Tan is Associate Professor with the Newcastle Business School, University of Newcastle. Sung-Young Kim (김성용) is Senior Lecturer in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences at Macquarie University. This article was originally published on The Conversation.

 

 

By John Mathews and Elizabeth Thurbon and Hao Tan, Sung-Young Kim

Source: Eco Business

Climate change: China’s forest carbon uptake ‘underestimated’

Posted on by dishanth
Climate change: China’s forest carbon uptake ‘underestimated’

China’s aggressive policy of planting trees is likely playing a significant role in tempering its climate impacts.

An international team has identified two areas in the country where the scale of carbon dioxide absorption by new forests has been underestimated.

Taken together, these areas account for a little over 35% of China’s entire land carbon “sink”, the group says.

The researchers’ analysis, based on ground and satellite observations, is reported in Nature journal.

A carbon sink is any reservoir – such as peatlands, or forests – that absorbs more carbon than it releases, thereby lowering the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

China is the world’s biggest source of human-produced carbon dioxide, responsible for around 28% of global emissions.

But it recently stated an intention to peak those emissions before 2030 and then to move to carbon neutrality by 2060.

The specifics of how the country would reach these goals is not clear, but it inevitably has to include not only deep cuts in fossil fuel use but ways also to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.

 

Some tree planting has come from a desire to establish vibrant timber and paper industries

 

“Achieving China’s net-zero target by 2060, recently announced by the Chinese President Xi Jinping, will involve a massive change in energy production and also the growth of sustainable land carbon sinks,” said co-author Prof Yi Liu at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

“The afforestation activities described in [our Nature] paper will play a role in achieving that target,” he told BBC News.

China’s increasing leafiness has been evident for some time. Billions of trees have been planted in recent decades, to tackle desertification and soil loss, and to establish vibrant timber and paper industries.

The new study refines estimates for how much CO2 all these extra trees could be taking up as they grow.

 

China is engaged in large programmes to conserve and expand its forests. GETTY IMAGES

 

The latest analysis examined a host of data sources. These comprised forestry records, satellite remote-sensing measurements of vegetation greenness, soil water availability; and observations of CO2, again made from space but also from direct sampling of the air at ground level.

“China is one of the major global emitters of CO2 but how much is absorbed by its forests is very uncertain,” said the IAP scientist Jing Wang, the report’s lead author.

“Working with CO2 data collected by the Chinese Meteorological Administration we have been able to locate and quantify how much CO2 is absorbed by Chinese forests.”

The two previously under-appreciated carbon sink areas are centred on China’s southwest, in Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi provinces; and its northeast, particularly Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces.

The land biosphere over southwest China, by far the largest single region of uptake, represents a sink of about -0.35 petagrams per year, representing 31.5% of the Chinese land carbon sink.

A petagram is a billion tonnes.

The land biosphere over northeast China, the researchers say, is seasonal, so it takes up carbon during the growing season but emits carbon otherwise. Its net annual balance is roughly -0.05 petagrams per year, representing about 4.5% of the Chinese land carbon sink.

To put these numbers in context, the group adds, China was emitting 2.67 petagrams of carbon as a consequence of fossil fuel use in 2017.

Prof Paul Palmer, a co-author from Edinburgh University, UK, said the size of the forest sinks might surprise people but pointed to the very good agreement between space and in situ measurements as reason for confidence.

“Bold scientific statements must be supported by massive amounts of evidence and this is what we have done in this study,” he told BBC News.

“We have collected together a range of ground-based and satellite data-driven evidence to form a consistent and robust narrative about the Chinese carbon cycle.”

 

Artwork: The Biomass satellite is one of several new mission to refine understanding of Earth carbon budgets

 

Prof Shaun Quegan from Sheffield University, UK, studies Earth’s carbon balance but was not involved in this research.

He said the extent of the northeast sink was not a surprise to him, but the southwest one was. But he cautioned that new forests’ ability to draw down carbon declines with time as the growth rate declines and the systems move towards a more steady state.

“This paper clearly illustrates how multiple sources of evidence from space data can increase our confidence in carbon flux estimates based on sparse ground data,” he said.

“This augurs well for the use of the new generation of space sensors to aid nations’ efforts to meet their commitments under the Paris Agreement.”

Prof Quegan is the lead scientist on Europe’s upcoming Biomass mission, a radar spacecraft that will essentially weigh forests from orbit. It will be able to tell where exactly the carbon is being stored, be it in tree trunks, in the soil or somewhere else.

Richard Black is director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), a non-profit think-tank working on climate change and energy issues.

He commented: “With China setting out its ambition for net zero, it’s obviously crucial to know the size of the national carbon sink, so this is an important study.

“However, although the forest sink is bigger than thought, no-one should mistake this as constituting a ‘free pass’ way to reach net zero. For one thing, carbon absorption will be needed to compensate for ongoing emissions of all greenhouse gases, not just CO2; for another, the carbon balance of China’s forests may be compromised by climate change impacts, as we’re seeing now in places such as California, Australia and Russia.”

 

 

By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent

Source: BBC