Making choices over China: EU-China co-operation on energy and climate By Nick Mabey ★ Europe has invested significantly in the creation of a sustainable global climate change control regime. The EU needs the Copenhagen summit to be enough of a success to maintain political and economic momentum towards a global low carbon economy. A perception of failure at Copenhagen would undermine Europe’s global influence and threaten its climate security. ★ Effective EU-China co-operation is critical to delivering a good deal at Copenhagen and to ensuring ongoing progress towards global decarbonisation. Europe and China are economically and politically interdependent, and have strikingly similar energy and climate change policies. As its largest investor, trade partner and provider of technology, Europe has a strong stake in China’s success. ★ The aim of the Copenhagen agreement and EU-China bilateral co-operation must be to help China move to a position where its leaders believe they can deliver a peak in domestic carbon emissions between 2020 and 2030, while maintaining fast enough economic development to ensure social stability. With the US and Japan strengthening their co-operation with China, Europe must act decisively to maintain its comparative advantage as the country’s leading economic and technology partner on low carbon economic development. ★ The EU and China should increase the status of energy and climate change in their bilateral relationship. This will require the progressive alignment of the EU’s and the individual member-states climate policies towards China, behind a common European strategy. The 2009 EU-China summit must deliver agreement on some key flagship co-operation projects in order to build China’s trust in the EU as an effective partner. Introduction The EU has a vital interest in ensuring that China moves rapidly towards a low carbon economy. Even with strong leadership at the highest level in China, this will not be easy, given the country’s scale, diversity and development needs. The building of an effective UN climate change agreement is an important component of this process and Europe must work hard to ensure that the Copenhagen summit in December 2009 is a success. But it is also crucial that the EU has a close bilateral relationship with China, which helps to accelerate the country’s transition to a low-carbon economy by leveraging Europe’s technology, expertise, investment and trade relationships.
Centre for European Reform 14 Great College Street London SW1P 3RX UK
European companies already inject over S1.5 billion a year into Chinese projects to lower emissions of greenhouse gases through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), while the 1 The Clean Development EU spends S60 million annually Mechanism (CDM) allows on official bilateral co-operation industrialised countries to earn on climate change issues.1 These emissions credits by investing sums will grow rapidly in the in emissions-reducing projects coming years especially if the in developing countries. Copenhagen summit produces These credits are used to meet countries’ an ambitious global agreement. industrialised emissions targets under the Unfortunately, the absence of a Kyoto protocol. common strategic approach to China means that Europe has not reaped all the benefits it could from its investment in China’s transition to a low carbon economy. Moreover,
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