Chinese Emission Trading Schemes in the Future of Global Carbon Markets

COP17, Durban. It was standing room only for the “2012, The Year of the Dragon: The Role of Chinese Emission Trading Schemes in the Future of Global Carbon Markets” side event held by GreenStream at COP17 in Durban on Thursday, 1 December 2011.

The expert panel, moderated by Dr Jussi Nykänen and consisting of [i]Dr Jiang Kejun, [ii]Xueman Wang, [iii]Alex Sarac and [iv]Dr Trevor Sikorski delivered  an informative and optimistic session on the developments and challenges of implementing emissions trading schemes in China. Given the scale of Chinese GHG emissions (currently 7.6 gigatonnes and estimated to grow to 9 gigatonnes by 2020) the design and implementation of the intended national emissions trading scheme is a pivotal issue for the future of global carbon markets.

Of particular note during the side event was the panel’s view that, as Ms Wang noted, “mitigation is no longer a dirty word in China”. The implementation of 7 pilot emission trading schemes by 2013 indicated that China was commencing the transformational change to a low-carbon economy, a transformation is key to global hopes of addressing harmful anthropocentric climate change. Undoubtedly, as with the creation of the EU ETS, there will be many challenges in the implementation of the upcoming pilot schemes.  Issues of data quality, GHG accounting, monitoring, reporting and verification, and baseline establishment will need to be addressed. Dr Nykänen concluded the session by highlighting that the experience of companies such as GreenStream would be essential in assisting both policy makers and affected installations to efficiently operationalise the pilot schemes by 2013, as he stated:

“The first step in solving the problems relating to emissions trading is to recognise the bottlenecks. The speakers clearly showed that the development of the emissions trading schemes in China is progressing fast but as it is, one cannot build a house in a day – not even in China”.

GreenStream has profound expertise on carbon financing and capitalising the carbon credits from projects that reduce emissions. In collaboration with its Beijing based team the Company has fruitfully managed the carbon finance cycle of a vast number of projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in China. GreenStream has also been involved in realizing a variety of emission reduction projects under the CDM or Joint Implementation (JI) in other parts of the world.

Date posted:

02/12/2011

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