China is expected to submit its post-2020 climate action plan to the UN by the end of the month, which will lay out measures to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions and increase its renewable energy consumption, experts said.
The action plan, called the Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC), was put under review on Friday in a meeting presided over by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
China pledged in the joint announcement on climate change that it and the U.S. signed after the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November 2014 in Beijing that its carbon dioxide emissions will no longer increase around 2030 and that by the same year around 20 percent of China's energy will come from non-fossil fuel sources.
"The joint China-U.S. announcement serves as the cornerstone of China's INDC, and in the action plan, China is unlikely to promise an earlier emissions peak or a more ambitious non-fossil energy goal," Wang Tao, a scholar with the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, told the Global Times.
China will be the last major emitter of carbon dioxide to submit its action plan ahead of climate change talks in Paris at the end of the year, following the U.S. and all EU members, Guo Hongyu, program officer at the Climate and Finance Policy Center of the Beijing-based NGO Greenovation Hub, told the Global Times.
"China's widely-expected INDC will guide and motivate other countries, especially developing countries, to prepare their own INDCs," she noted.
In addition to the two main goals outlined in the joint announcement, the World Resources Institute, a global energy and environment think tank, hopes that the INDC may contain a post-2020 emissions intensity goal, which would lay out a target in terms of emissions per unit of GDP, and a forest restoration goal, which would "shed further light on China's future emissions trajectory," read a press release issued by its China office on Tuesday.
China pledged in 2014 to reduce its carbon emissions intensity to 40 to 45 percent below the 2005 level by 2020.
The country's carbon emissions intensity dropped to 28.5 percent below the 2005 level in 2013, equal to a decrease in annual emissions of 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to Xinhua.
