Knowledge gaps are making it harder to formulate national climate policies

To confront the negative effects of climate change, China decided to join the 2016 Paris Agreement, along with more than 190 countries. China has gradually moved the articles in this major climate treaty from advice to implementation. By taking a long-term view, Chinese leadership says they’re committed to achieving the peak of carbon emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. In doing so, China has put forward various measures (e.g., energy reform; afforestation; and carbon capture, utilization, and storage [CCUS] technologies) for abating carbon emissions. However, existing scientific knowledge gaps in estimating China’s carbon emissions and sinks, discussed here, block the effective formulation of China’s climate policies. Carbon neutrality means that human-induced CO2 emissions are counterbalanced by human-induced CO2 removal over a specified period (1). Therefore, the two most important prerequisites for drafting carbon-abatement policies in China are the amount of anthropogenic CO2 released into the atmosphere and the amount of CO2 sunk annually. We argue that in order to formulate an effective national climate policy, China and other countries need to fill in many more of the gaps in their scientific knowledge about the impact of carbon emissions and sinks.

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