The Chinese Carbon-Neutral Goal: Challenges and Prospects.

On 22 September 2020, within the backdrop of the COVID-19 global pandemic, China announced its climate goal for peak carbon emissions before 2030 and to reach carbon neutrality before 2060. This carbon-neutral goal is generally considered to cover all anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The planning effort is now in full swing in China, but the pathway to decarbonization is unclear. The needed transition towards non-fossil fuel energy and its impact on China and the world may be more profound than its reform and development over the past 40 years, but the challenges are enormous. Analysis of four representative scenarios shows significant differences in achieving the carbon-neutral goal, particularly the contribution of non-fossil fuel energy sources. The high target values for nuclear, wind, and bioenergy have approached their corresponding resource limitations, with solar energy being the exception, suggesting solar's critical role. We also found that the near-term policies that allow for a gradual transition, followed by more drastic changes after 2030, can eventually reach the carbon-neutral goal and lead to less of a reduction in cumulative emissions, thus inconsistent with the IPCC 1.5°C scenario. The challenges and prospects are discussed in the historical context of China's socio-economic reform, globalization, international collaboration, and development.

Climate model shows large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara increase rain and vegetation.

Wind and solar farms offer a major pathway to clean, renewable energies. However, these farms would significantly change land surface properties, and, if sufficiently large, the farms may lead to unintended climate consequences. In this study, we used a climate model with dynamic vegetation to show that large-scale installations of wind and solar farms covering the Sahara lead to a local temperature increase and more than a twofold precipitation increase, especially in the Sahel, through increased surface friction and reduced albedo. The resulting increase in vegetation further enhances precipitation, creating a positive albedo-precipitation-vegetation feedback that contributes ~80% of the precipitation increase for wind farms. This local enhancement is scale dependent and is particular to the Sahara, with small impacts in other deserts.