Low carbon development planning and analysis toolkit
A technical toolkit for low carbon development planning and analysis is being developed and piloted through cooperation between Chinese and US institutions. Its aim is to support China’s provinces and cities in setting and meeting goals for growing their economies, reducing energy and greenhouse gas intensity and improving environmental impacts.
Context
China’s 12th Five Year Plan established national goals for Low Carbon Development (LCD). Under the plan, each province and city is required to set their baselines and goals for economic growth, GHG emissions reduction, and energy intensity reduction, consistent with national targets.
In practice, central government mandates do not guarantee that local governments will comply fully given flexibility provisions and the widespread use of “countermeasures” to avoid unpalatable mandates. However central government also provides training and capacity building support, technical assistance to encourage implementation by provincial and local officials.
Such tools and approaches are usually developed through piloting in lead provinces, before scaling up nationally.
Approach
In order to develop the toolkit for assessment, establishment, and implementation of low carbon development goals at a provincial level the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the China Academy of Science Institute for Policy Management (CAS/IPM) are working with international The Center for Climate Strategies (CCS) and the Global Environment Institute (GEI). As the lead technical partner, CCS provides coaching, capacity building, and quality control, drawing on lessons from US climate action planning. The toolkit is being piloted in Chongqing province as a basis for replication and scaling to other provinces through in 2014-2016.
While this partnership is funded by private philanthropic organizations it has received formal government endorsements for by the US State Department and China’s NDRC through an EcoPartnership Award.
The major choices made by partners included:
Focus on technique transfer (“how to”) as the missing link for China’s advancement of climate change mitigation and Low Carbon Development;
Design a process that supports self-determination by China on the adaptation of a US based, subnational template;
Use technical tools to support policy selection, design, evaluation, and monitoring;
Creation of tools for public collaboration and capacity building as opposed to closed, proprietary systems that may inhibit scaling and expansion;
Focus policy development at the subnational level in a manner that translates national goals to the local level, and can scale local efforts to the national level.
At the heart of the toolkit is a state of the art modeling system, which allows direct and indirect benefits and costs to be assessed. It is designed to support program level decisions in each sector as they are applied to government programs, such as industrial development, economic shift, energy shift, urbanization, and modernization of agriculture.
While the process will provide significant new information to governmental executives and managers, China's leadership maintains this data should not be shared with the public, or foreign organizations. As a result, the decision process used for LCD does not include important elements of openness and inclusion found in green growth processes elsewhere.
Nonetheless, the LCD system does include a stepwise, fact based system for decisions involving local civil servants and technical institutes, along with national government and institutes. The data frameworks and policy and technical decisions within the LCD system are structured for multi-party review and collaboration, so the transition toward expanded collaboration is possible. This may be driven by international and domestic needs for transparency, and the recognition by policy makers in China that expert group process is critical for fully reliable feasibility analysis. Hence, local experts and interests could ultimately be invited into this LCD planning system.
Outcomes
The Chongqing LCD pilot is nearing completion along with the Toolkit, and ready for scale up in 2014. This will involve a training and curriculum program with the Chinese Academy of Governance (CAG) designed to train civil servant executives and managers at the subnational levels, followed by commitments for LCD planning in each jurisdiction.
While it is too soon to know if the project will result in direct impacts from better provincial planning, it has impacted thinking among Chinese policy makers at the national and provincial levels in some key areas:
That triple win policy design is possible and economic tradeoffs are not inevitable and future economic growth will depend on lower energy and resource footprints;
That newly measured baselines show China’s emissions trajectories may be worse than thought;
That existing air quality actions may not be sufficient in engineering the energy and industrial shifts needed to set strong greenhouse gas reduction goals
That many new options exist to move ahead in each sector for stronger action.
