China’s new Five-Year Plan is a letdown on climate

China watchers hoped China’s latest five-year plan, the policy document dictating the country’s near-term economic strategy, would contain new details on how the country plans to hit peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and maybe even move that date ahead a few years.

But the plan, released on March 5, failed to deliver. The world’s top greenhouse gas emitter announced no new targets beyond what officials already committed to over the last year. Although the plan calls for a “major push” on clean energy development, the vague commitment all but guarantees emissions will continue to increase until 2030, when officials have promised they will peak.

“It’s simply aggregating existing targets from last year,” said Fan Dai, director of the California-China Climate Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s a lot of room for further development and ambition, especially around those targets that were missing that we hoped would be included.”

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