Can Asian nations overtake China on kicking CO2 to the curb?
As the year comes to a close, we at the South China Morning Post and news outlets around the world have been reporting about the heightened urgency with which governments seem to be thinking, talking and acting on climate-change issues even as they deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.
This focus has come as it becomes fully apparent that the emission cuts agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement are nowhere near what is needed to prevent global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in this century - which would imperil human civilisation.
This weekend's virtual Climate Ambition Summit co-organised by the United Nations and Britain - in conjunction with the fifth anniversary of the Paris accord - is testament to this momentum. Leaders of some 70 countries are expected to deliver national statements at the meeting, mostly through pre-recorded messages. Among them will be many Asian leaders.
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One thing I will be looking out for are signals from the region about plans for a carbon-trading scheme, which is increasingly regarded as one of the most potent ways to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
A typical scheme, like the one in place in the European Union, requires heavy carbon dioxide (CO2) emitters like factories and power plants to buy pollution permits. Airlines do the same for flights in Europe.
In Asia, South Korea is seen as a trailblazer, with the Korean Emissions Trading Scheme launched in 2015 currently covering some 70 per cent of the country's greenhouse gases. But there is no region-wide programme on the same scale as Europe.
All eyes had initially been on China after the leading climate-change official there, Li Gao, in January suggested a "breakthrough" was possible this year in the initial roll-out of the country's carbon-trading mechanism.
However, industry insiders polled in the 2020 China Carbon Pricing Survey released this week noted that the mechanism is unlikely to be functional by next year. Still, some three-quarters of 567 respondents said they believed the network would be fully operational by 2025.
As the world's biggest source of greenhouse gases, the speed at which China moves on this front will have some sway over how others in Asia and elsewhere act. But this doesn't mean countries should drag their feet until the Chinese trading mechanism is up and running. And indeed, they are not.
Jackson Ewing, a US-based researcher who has advised Asian governments on environmental policy issues, recently told me that he saw Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore all making "tangible steps" on emissions trading.
Also cause for optimism were comments this past week by Singaporean central bank chief Ravi Menon on a private sector-led coalition in the island state that hopes to create a region-wide market ecosystem for voluntary carbon credits.
This could be a game changer in what is currently a fragmented sector with thin liquidity.
As Ewing put it, whether these Asian countries make progress on their respective carbon-trading plans in 2021 "depends on the degree to which they see emissions trading as a core climate-mitigation policy moving forward, and the levels of political support they are able to muster".
Once seen as sedate and the domain of policy wonks, climate governance issues like emissions trading looks set to be of mainstream interest. My suggestion - watch this space as we too shift up gears in covering climate policy in Asia.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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