Greening global trade is a vital step to achieving sustainable development, and developing countries are well positioned to help catalyze this transition, according to a new report released today by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
The official in change of China’s climate change program says the country will have enabling legislation to support a national carbon market in place by 2015.
Shenzhen, the Chinese Special Economic Zone and across the border from Hong Kong, will open carbon emissions trading market on Monday 17 June, according to city’s mayor.
China’s tax authorities will wait at least another year to introduce a tax on carbon, deferring to concern that economic growth might suffer, according to a Ministry of Finance (MoF) official.
Planning for a carbon tax has been underway since China’s 12th Five-year Plan was announced two years ago. At the beginning of last year MoF experts suggested levying a carbon tax in 2012 at 10 yuan (USD1.6) per tonne of CO2, increasing to 50 yuan (USD8) per tonne by 2020. Just last month Jia Chen, head of the Ministry of Finance’s Tax Policy Division, revealed a new set of taxation policies, including a tax on CO2 emissions, designed to preserve the environment.
It appears that there may be light at the end of the tunnel in the ongoing dispute between China and the EU over aviation emissions by skirting the latter’s provocative Emissions Trading System (ETS).
China is forging ahead with development of a national carbon market, beginning with seven pilot programs in major industrial centers, even as the viability of carbon markets is being questioned amid collapsing prices in Europe.
“This is a commitment, to a certain level, even a political commitment, at the very top level,” Changhua Wu, Greater China Director at the Climate Group, said at the CleanBiz.Asia seminar on China’s Emerging Carbon Market – Opportunities and Challenges Ahead held yesterday.
Indonesia this week approved a rainforest conservation project that sets aside an area roughly the size of Singapore and rewards investors with tradable carbon credits in the first of its kind to win formal backing in the country, according to a Reuters report yesterday.
A Japanese official at the COP18 climate talks in Doha has admitted that his country may back away from its target to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The target was one of the most ambitious of any industrialized country and won plaudits from environmentalists.
Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has approved a plan to manage the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and establish a global carbon trading scheme after 2020.
The carbon reduction plan is included in the country's commitment to implement the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and other international conventions on environmental protection adopted by Vietnam.
Vietnam will compile a periodical report about greenhouse gas emissions every two years which will be based on results from the soon-to-be-established National Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory System.
A roll-call of multinational companies have called on governments ahead of Doha to introduce a global carbon price. They also called unequivocally on world leaders to find agreement in order to drive change “at a pace commensurate with the 2°C goal”.
South Korea will start trial operations of its cap-and-trade carbon system next year. Nam Kwang Hee, director general of the Presidential Committee on Green Growth, told Bloomberg that Korea plans to use the European Union’s model for emissions trading.
South Korea announced this week that its largest local polluters will be forced to cut domestic emissions before they will be given any carbon offset credits for reductions overseas, according to a Bloomberg report.
India's regulatory authorities seem to be clamping down on non-compliance of renewable-energy quotas. According to Bloomberg, Reliance Industries and Tata Steel are among 50 companies who’ve been sent compliance letters by the Indian government.
A glut of renewable-energy credits in India surged to a record in October as state electricity utilities failed to comply with clean-energy targets, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
South Korea’s economy ministry said today that it wants companies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 3 percent to 553.4 million tonnes next year, effectively doubling the reductions achieved in 2012, as it prepares for its new cap-and-trade scheme starting in 2015.
The local industrial and power sectors are on track to record emission of 570.6 million tonnes this year which is a reduction of 8 million tonnes or 1.42 percent over 2011. The ministry said it wants to see further cuts of 17.2 million in 2013.
The European Commission (EU) announced on Thursday that it had struck an agreement with China to co-operate more closely on cutting carbon emissions through various project including the development of Chinese emissions trading schemes, according to Reuters.
About 800 companies in China’s booming southern city of Shenzhen will be issued carbon quotas and face penalties for exceeding emissions targets from next year.
The city, which borders Hong Kong in the Guangdong province and was once home to the majority of the Pearl River Delta’s manufacturing operations, is one of seven carbon trading test zones appointed by the central government in October.
China is researching the foundation of a national carbon-trading market before linking with other countries' carbon trading schemes, a top climate change official was quoted by the China Daily.
The United States, Australia, Japan and the European Union are all discussing building a sub-regional or regional carbon market with China, said Xie Zhenhua, vice-chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, but the country is holding off while it gets its own ducks in a row.
This report by the World Bank spells out what the world would be like if it warmed by 4 degrees Celsius, which is what scientists are nearly unanimously predicting by the end of the century, without serious policy changes.
Companies in Asia reveal expectations that regulations that could lead to rising costs for reporting and reducing GHG emissions will also be the main sources of climate-related business opportunities.
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