Green growth - an opportunity, not a liability

The global climate crisis is one of the most daunting crises precipitated by traditional economic growth. In Britain and the United States, industrialization took place a century or two ago when there was much less knowledge about the adverse affects of early capitalism, so few efforts were made to contain industrialization.

With its track record of rapid growth, China is one of the countries most affected by climate change. In the Global Climate Risk Index, an index that tracks which countries suffer most from extreme weather events based on the past two decades of recorded weather data, China and the United States are both ranked 26th worldwide, significantly behind India (17th) or Russia (23rd), but far ahead of South Africa (74th) and Brazil (78th). China's massive population translates into extraordinarily high death tolls and total economic losses, and the country's vast and diverse territory means that it suffers from a higher overall number of extreme weather events.

Neither China nor other large emerging economies have the luxury of replicating the experience of advanced countries that became rich first and cleaned up later.

China's new growth plan, which was developed in concert with the World Bank, supports the country's efforts to "grow green." Much will depend on how effectively government policies make firms internalize negative externalities and motivate firms to innovate and seek technological breakthroughs.

As China makes real gains in low-carbon development, the correlation between growth and carbon emissions will significantly weaken, and carbon emissions will peak. Such decoupling is already on the horizon, so it is likely that peak emissions in China will happen sometime in the 2020s.

Common but differentiated responsibilities

Today, all parties in the global climate talks support the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities," abbreviated as CBDR. On the one hand, all countries have a shared responsibility to protect the climate. On the other hand, each country's level of responsibility varies according to its historical contributions to global warming and its current capacity to address the problem.

In 1992, the UN categorized countries' CBDR in terms of whether the countries were then industrialized or developing. Next year's Paris conference must determine whether a comparable classification system will be used and how different types of obligations will apply to the mitigation, adaptation or financing responsibilities of different groups of countries. The outcome of the Peru talks will give us a general idea about which scenarios are more likely.

The issue of CBDR is highly contentious, dividing advanced economies from emerging economies, even creating internal divisions in emerging nations themselves.

Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change, has warned against sorting mechanisms, arguing that all countries must take responsibility. Conveniently, such a solution would force emerging and developing countries to take responsibility for the historical pollution that was caused by today's advanced economies.

Understandably, many parties continue to insist on using sorting mechanisms, including the members of the Least Developed Countries Group, the Africa Group and the Like-Minded Developing Countries, which include China, India, Indonesia and Venezuela.

A viable solution must take both advanced nations' concerns about aggregate pollution and emerging economies' concerns about per capita pollution into account.

The U.S.-China climate change deal suggests that pragmatic compromises may come in the near future. But neither the construction of those compromises nor their enforcement will be easy.

The author is a columnist with China.org.cn.

(China.org.cn December 11, 2014)