CHINA’S 12TH FIVE-YEAR PLAN
BY DEBORAH SELIGSOHN
BEIJING, CHINA - The draft of China’s muchanticipated
12th Five-Year Plan was released on Saturday, March 5 at the opening session of the National People’s Congress. While there may be some changes to the Plan before it is finalized, in past years these have not been large.
World Resources Institute obtained a copy of the 118-page draft of the 12th Five-Year Plan which we used as the basis for our analysis. In the meantime, Xinhua provided a summary of the major targets included in the 12th Five-Year Plan. In addition, a number of the key reports delivered at the first day of the NPC are also online in both Chinese and English, and these reports include the Work Report issued by Premier Wen Jiabao. Premier Wen’s Work Report includes both an assessment of the previous five years and a summary of highlights of the next Five-Year Plan. Our analysis is derived from both the initial draft of the 12th Five-Year Plan and the Work Report.
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Deborah Seligsohn, World Resources Institute
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What’s notable in the Plan and the Work Report is the prominent position of both climate change and environmental issues, in addition to energy
issues. Indeed, not only is this the first Five-
Year Plan that mentions climate change, but
it is mentioned at the top of the environmental
section. There is also a full paragraph
detailing China’s commitment to international
cooperation and the UN-led climate
negotiation process, including concerns of
climate finance and technology transfer. The
Plan also discusses the need to implement
more climate adaptation-related policies,
such as greater preparedness for extreme
weather events.
ENERGY AND CLIMATE TARGETS:
There are separate targets for energy
intensity (16 percent reduction by 2015) and
CO2 emissions per unit GDP (17 percent
reduction by 2015). These are within the
expected range and congruent with the 40
to 45 percent reduction in carbon intensity
from 2005 levels that was first announced in
the Copenhagen talks and reaffirmed in
Cancun this past November. Clearly defined
and distinct energy and CO2 emissions targets
will help ensure provinces implement
energy policies with carbon goals clearly in
mind. Somewhat surprisingly, there was no
mention of a total energy consumption target,
which was recently announced by
China’s former Minister in charge of the
National Energy Administration, Zhang
Guobao. It will be interesting to see whether
this emerges in the specific energy-sector
plan that will come later this spring.
The draft Plan and Work Reports also
include noteworthy policies in:
FORESTS
China has been steadily increasing forest
cover since the founding of the People’s
Republic in 1949. This next five year plan
goes a significant distance toward meeting
China’s Copenhagen commitment on
forests. In the Plan itself, the Chinese government
set a goal to increase the area of
forest cover by 12.5 million hectares by
2015, while in Premier Wen’s Work Report,
he announced a forest stock volume goal of
600 million m3. While the forest cover area
goal seems more or less in line with the
already stated 2020 goal to increase forest
cover by 40 million hectares over 2005 levels,
the volume stock target seems more
ambitious because it seeks to achieve
almost half of the 15-year target of 1.3 billion
cubic meters by year 2020.
TRACKING IMPLEMENTATION
To achieve these climate and energy
targets, the level of detail and specificity,
covering a full range of resource and environmental
issues, provided in the Plan and
the Work Reports are impressive. Premier
Wen stated that China would put in place
“well-equipped statistical and monitoring systems for greenhouse gas emissions,
energy conservation and emissions reductions”
to ensure these policies are tracked
and properly implemented.
EFFICIENCY
China has had a particularly successful
track record on industrial energy efficiency
in the previous five years. In the new
Plan, there are both new policies to promote
greater industrial efficiency, and a major
push to include all other sectors of the economy,
including both new and existing buildings.
For example, the Plan introduces a
10,000 Enterprises Program. While we don’t
have details as to what this program will be,
it appears to be a ramp up of the successful
Top 1,000 enterprises program. We’ll certainly
be following this development closely
in the coming months. Following the
endorsement of new types of mechanisms
in the October Party Plenum Document, the
Plan specifically endorses market approaches
like energy service companies (ESCOs)
that help to finance energy efficiency.
TRANSPORT
While China certainly has plans for
additional air and road transport, what is
striking is the commitment to rail, both long
distance and in urban mass transit. The Plan
includes proposals for the construction of
35,000 km of high-speed rail and a goal to
connect every city with a population greater
than 500,000. There are also plans to
improve subway and light rail in cities that
already have urban transit systems, building
new systems in at least nine other cities,
and making plans for six or more cities. We
expect to see more detail and perhaps more
cities as the sector-specific plan becomes
available.
NON-FOSSIL ENERGY
The Plan incorporates the goal of 11.4
percent non-fossil fuels in primary energy
consumption by 2015 announced by Zhang
Guobao last month. China continues to
exceed earlier targets in non-fossil development.
For example, the five-year target for,
wind is 70 gigawatts of additional installation
which exceeds the 2020 target of just a
few years ago. For nuclear, the plan is to
install 40 additional gigawatts of capacity by
2015. China currently has around 10 GW of
installed nuclear capacity now, which means
that if this five-year target is achieved, China
is likely to exceed even the expectation of
70 GW by 2020 discussed a year ago. If
China achieves these numbers, it will have
the world’s highest installed capacity of
nuclear energy by 2020.
ENVIRONMENT
The Plan itself does not make clear
the specific targets for major environmental
pollutants. However, they were all
announced at an official NPC-connected
press conference. On March 6, Zhang Ping,
Director of the National Development and Reform Commission, stated that the reduction
targets for Chemical Oxygen Demand
(COD) and Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) are 8 percent,
while ammonia nitrogen and nitrogen
oxides are 10 percent. Director Zhang also
said that these targets would be made binding
for the first time in the 12th Five-Year
Plan, as well as an “index evaluation system”
implemented to allocate targets to
provinces and ensure they are on track to
meet reductions. We are not clear on exactly
how these targets will be made binding,
whether there will be additional documents
at this NPC, or whether they will be binding
in a later sector-specific plan.
While the Plan itself is general on targets,
it is much more specific on policies. It
assigns specific targets for cities required to
reach new motor vehicle emission standards
and sets goals for a wide variety of
environmental infrastructure, including
wastewater and solid waste treatment.
There is also a strong emphasis on reuse
and recycling, or what the Chinese call “circular
economy.”
China is a middle-income, developing
country and the next five years is when it
needs to put in place the infrastructure that
will enable it to develop successfully into a
high-income developing country and
beyond. There’s a clear recognition in these
plans of the importance of environmental
sustainability in being able to reach not just
higher levels of income and but also
increased welfare of the Chinese people.
The Plan itself is highly specific in some
areas but also in others somewhat unclear
(for instance, target pollutants). Much of the
clarity in implementation comes through
sectoral plans and later regulations and
guidance. WRI will continue to track policy
implementation as it unfolds.
The World Resources Institute is an
environmental think tank that goes beyond
research to create practical ways to protect
the earth and improve people's lives.
Deborah Seligsohn is the World
Resource Institute’s senior policy advisor on
climate and energy based in Beijing, China.
She serves as Principal Advisor to WRI’s climate
and energy program on issues in
China as well as to the ChinaFAQs China
Climate and Energy Network. She blogs
regularly at www.chinafaqs.org, as well as
researching and writing on a variety of
issues connected on both China and international
climate policy. Her recent publications
have focused on Chinese emissions,
technology issues and US-China relations.
Prior to joining WRI, she served for
over 20 years in the U.S. State Department,
where she worked on energy and environment
issues in China, India, Nepal and New
Zealand. Her most recent position was as
Environment, Science, Technology and
Health Counselor on Beijing. She has a
master’s degree from Princeton University’s
Woodrow Wilson School in Science,
Technology and Environmental Policy, and
her BA is from Harvard University in East
Asian Studies. She speaks fluent Chinese
and some Hindi. |