By David Stanway and David Kirton
SHENZHEN, China, November 27 (Reuters) – In a gleaming new subway station on the edge of Shenzhen, the local government is promoting “carbon coins” to commuters to earn and trade for shopping vouchers and travel cards to get households to join China’s fight against climate change.
The southeastern city’s “Carbon Road for All” scheme, which rewards people for cutting back on their use of public transport, is one of dozens around China encouraging citizens to ditch cars, plant trees and cut energy use.
The so-called “carbon inclusion” programs are part of the ruling Communist Party’s campaign to mobilize all of society, not just industry, to transform the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases into a carbon-neutral country by 2060.
China’s efforts to tackle climate change will be under intense scrutiny as negotiators from around the world gather for the COP28 meetings in Dubai next week.
While the task of reducing the country’s emissions is massive, potential reductions for individuals could be huge. A 2021 Chinese Academy of Sciences study said households contribute more than half of China’s total emissions of more than 10 billion tons a year.
“Carbon inclusion is a huge platform and an effective way to mobilize the public to practice low-carbon, zero-carbon and negative-carbon activities,” said Xie Zhenhua, China’s top climate envoy, at the launch of a government committee on carbon -inclusion in August.
Finally, China wants the schemes to be integrated into national emissions trading and generate credits that can offset emissions from industrial pollutants, government plans show.
PERSONAL CARBON BUSINESS
China’s carbon inclusion ambitions have been in gestation since 2015, when the southeastern province of Guangdong published rules on how to convert low-carbon activity into credits.
Since then, dozens of schemes have appeared across the country, accessing personal data as a step, the use of transport and the purchase of efficient or environmentally friendly products to generate carbon coins.
Banks have also tried “personal carbon account” systems. The People’s Bank of China set up a pilot “carbon to gold loan” scheme in the city of Quzhou, allowing customers to earn carbon points that could improve credit ratings.
Other countries have toyed with the idea of personal carbon trading, with pilot schemes set up in Finland and Australia’s Norfolk Island. The British environment ministry also commissioned a study into the possibility in 2006 but concluded that it was not yet politically or economically feasible.
Singapore currently operates a scheme that rewards efficient electricity users with “leaf” tokens that can be exchanged for shopping vouchers.
“Various actors have tried voluntary schemes that do things like visualization or sharing of energy or emissions data on a smaller scale,” said Benjamin Sovacool, professor of Earth and Environment at Boston University.
“But they lack the scale and scope of what the Chinese have in mind, and they haven’t been incorporated into carbon currencies, which is a smart idea.”
QUANTIFICATION, TRADE HURDLES
A major challenge is how to commercialize carbon dioxide emission reductions from a wide range of human behavior – including the way people go to work, heat their household or take out the garbage.
“It’s all about control,” said Yifei Li, a professor of Environmental Studies at New York University’s Shanghai campus. “When it comes to the level of variability, how people lead their lives is so wildly different. That’s a big problem.”
Zhang Xin, vice-chairman of the environment ministry’s carbon inclusion committee, said better standards were needed to quantify low-carbon behaviour, warning in comments published this year that the proliferation of schemes “has been in confusion and inconsistency”.
Academics also say it is unclear whether the schemes generate new cuts in carbon dioxide emissions or just record those that are happening anyway.
Shanghai said in regulations that came into force this month that its schemes would eventually be “fully linked” to the local carbon market, with businesses allowed to apply to use domestic carbon reductions to meet targets.
Guangdong also allows businesses to meet 10% of carbon reduction commitments through carbon inclusion credits.
China is still a long way from meeting such emissions trading ambitions. Most users remain passive participants: one Beijing-based scheme claims more than 30 million users, but only 1.4% are active, according to research published this year.
And there are concerns that the carbon-inclusive schemes could let industrial polluters off the hook by shifting the burden of emissions reductions to households.
“The direction they are going at the moment is indeed to transfer climate responsibilities from these large firms and more to individuals,” Li said.
“That is extremely dangerous,” he added, because it can “remove individuals from climate action.”
VOLUNTARY VS MANDATORY
While tens of millions of people have already signed up to plans across the country, some experts fear it will give the state more powers to interfere in people’s lives and punish those who fail to make the right low-carbon choices.
“Although the scheme is currently voluntary, the lack of transparency, the irresponsible nature of the Chinese government and the government’s record of using big data for social control are all reasons for concern,” said Yaqiu Wang, research director for China at the Freedom. House think tank.
Critics point to China’s handling of environmental problems with controversial measures such as closing thousands of businesses to cut pollution, moving homes to make way for national parks and banning poor households from using coal for heating.
Chinese climate official Su Wei told local media that China’s green transformation “will inevitably involve profound changes in people’s daily habits and consumption patterns,” but he said carbon-inclusive schemes would remain voluntary.
The carbon coin promotion at the Shenzhen station attracted little interest among commuters on a busy weekday in October. However, the local government was optimistic about the project, saying last month that it had registered 14.6 million users since its launch in August 2022, reducing emissions by 720,000 tonnes.
(Reporting by David Stanway in Singapore; Additional reporting by David Kirton in Shenzhen; Editing by Sonali Paul)
((david.stanway@thomsonreuters.com))
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