China’s Big Year for Climate Commitments

August was a “green” themed month for China’s political messaging. The tone was set on August 1, when the new issue of Qiushi, the official journal of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee, reprinted a speech Xi had made back in July 2023 at the National Conference on Ecological and Environmental Protection.

“China’s economic and social development has entered a high-quality stage characterized by accelerated green and low-carbon transformation, while ecological conservation remains in a critical period marked by mounting pressure and challenging tasks,” Xi declared in the speech.

Two weeks after Qiushi’s publication, Premier Li Qiang delivered remarks at an August 15  event marking. “Our skies are bluer, our land is greener, our waters are clearer, our ecological environment is more beautiful, and the ‘green’ content of economic growth continues to rise,” Li extolled, promising further improvements in environmental and ecological protection.

The focus on environmental protection is not surprising – 2025 will be a crucial year for decision-making on China’s approach to climate issues. The 15th Five-Year Plan, covering the period 2026-2030, is in the planning stages; it will include key economic and environmental benchmarks. Most importantly, observers are watching to see how China handles a transition away from benchmarks for reducing emissions intensity (meaning emissions per unit of GDP) to reducing total emissions. With Xi having pledged to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030, it’s time for China to start pursuing absolute declines.

Before the 15th Five-Year Plan is released, China (and the rest of the world) will have to submit its latest round of National Determined Contributions (NDCs) – the rather clunky name for each country’s commitments toward mitigating climate change, as mandated by the 2015 Paris Agreement. China’s updated NDC is expected before COP30, the U.N. climate conference in November. For the first time, China’s NDC (covering the period to 2035) will include all greenhouse gases, not just carbon dioxide. But not much else is known about the plan yet, including how ambitious China’s new goals will be.

The stakes are as high as possible – literally global survival – and China is feeling the effects of changing global temperatures as much as any country. At the end of July, northern China was hit with a massive deluge – in some areas near Beijing, a “year’s worth of rain fell in less than a week,” as Reuters put it. Over 60 people were killed in the resulting floods and landslides, including at least 44 in Beijing; more than 80,000 were displaced.

The catastrophic flooding in July may have encouraged the state media focus on environmental issues in August. Whatever the reason, it’s encouraging to see China’s propaganda apparatus so closely linking the theme of environmental protection to Xi Jinping personally. That sends a clear signal that China’s top leadership is invested in these issues – and local officials need to follow suit.

In addition to republishing Xi’s 2023 speech and making frequent references to “Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization,” Chinese state media outlets have also been emphasizing an old quote from Xi that “clear waters and green mountains are mountains of gold and silver” (绿水青山就是金山银山). The phrase, awkward as it is when rendered in English, has been turned into an ecological catchphrase. In August, Xinhua even published a lengthy feature on the supposed 20th anniversary of Xi first uttering the phrase (although China Media Project has demonstrated he was not, in fact, the one to coin it).

The Xinhua article involved a rare, if tacit, admission of mistakes made, noting that China’s “miracle of rapid development… brought about a concentrated outbreak of environmental problems.” Xi’s “clear waters and green mountains” mantra is supposed to encourage a rethink of the long-troubled “relationship between economic development and environmental protection,” the state news agency explained. Today, China is “determined to abandon the development approach that sacrificed the environment in exchange for economic and social progress.”

To quote from Li on National Ecology Day, that means China must “firmly promote the green and low-carbon transformation of industries, and accelerate the formation of an industrial structure with high technological content, low resource consumption, and less environmental pollution.”

It may seem odd that China’s top leadership is emphasizing its commitment to environmental protection even as growth struggles. In fact, for China’s policymakers there is no contradiction – clean energy is envisioned as both a means of environmental protection and a mechanism for boosting future growth. Through early investment and strong state backing, Chinese companies have established dominant positions in the industries of the green revolution: electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, and more. The energy transition is supposed to be an economic boon for China, which is pinning its hopes on the so-called “new three” of electric vehicles, batteries, and solar power.

Yet even as Beijing sees economic advantage in green technologies, environmental progress has been spotty. The Climate Action Tracker (CAT) rates Beijing’s efforts thus far as “highly insufficient” to meet the goal of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The group also noted that China is almost certain to fail to achieve even its modest goal for emissions intensity reduction as set out in the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025).

In large part, that’s because China remains highly dependent on coal, which fueled a massive emissions spike in 2023, as the country shook off its pandemic lockdowns. Emissions were fairly stable in 2024, and the CAT expects them to stay that way through “around 2028, followed by a modest annual decline averaging 1.7 percent.”

Yet China has seen noted environmental successes, for which it deserves credit. As Xi highlighted in his speech in 2023 – the one that recently resurfaced in Qiushi – China has notched major success on both air and water pollution. The average concentration of PM2.5 particulate matter has dropped immensely since a national “Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan” was unveiled in 2013. In China’s major cities, levels of PM2.5 have dropped by some 40 percent, from around 50 micrograms per cubic meter on average in 2015 to just over 30 in 2024. Meanwhile, water quality has improved in both of China’s major rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River.

But problems remain. PM2.5 pollution levels are still well above the World Health Organization’s target of an annual average of just 5 micrograms per cubic meter. On the WHO’s four-tired “interim target list,” China has barely cleared the first goal (35 micrograms/cubic meter). And further progress may be hard to come by. Researchers Ben Silver et al, in a March 2025 article for Environmental International, showed that China’s improvements in PM2.5 pollution peaked from 2014-2019, and there have been minimal gains since then.

In terms of pollution, as in many other metrics, China remains bifurcated between its developed eastern provinces and the poorer central and western regions. Much of eastern China, having already become relatively wealthy, is now focusing more on environmental protection. But the inland regions are still struggling to get their economies on the right foot – and, despite Xi’s urging, continue to accept environmental damage as the price of development.

The Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) has found that China’s air pollution, while down on a national scale, is actually rising in “western areas that are not prioritized in air pollution control policies.” For example CREA reported that in the first quarter of 2025 PM2.5 pollution dropped by 19 percent and 21 percent in Shanghai and Beijing, respectively, but grew by 32 percent in Guangxi Province.

Even farther west, in Tibet and Xinjiang, China makes no secret of its prioritization of economic development, which is seen as a panacea for the security issues that have plagued both regions. In Tibet in particular, Li headlined the opening of construction on a new mega-dam on the the Yarlung Tsangpo River less than a month before he spoke on National Ecology Day. His remarks emphasized the supposed economic benefits – and paid little attention to the mounting evidence of hydropower’s environmental costs.

In a context where activists face jail time for drawing attention to environmental issues, few put much stock in Li’s facile pronouncement that “special emphasis must be placed on ecological conservation to prevent environmental damage.”

In many ways, the Yarlung Tsangpo dam reflects the thorny dilemmas of China’s approach to the environment. It will undoubtedly do major damage – some foreseen, some not – to the fragile ecological balance of the Tibetan Plateau, as hydropower projects around the world always do. Yet the energy it generates will also help wean China off of coal.

In Xi’s Thought on Ecological Civilization, the trade-off is apparently worth it. But with no mechanism for civil society to weigh in, we cannot know whether China’s people agree with that conclusion.