A Partnership for Action on Green Economy (PAGE) report shows how the Chinese provinces of Jiangsu and Fujian are making inroads to greener development.
Two eastern Chinese provinces are making strong efforts towards green development. This is according to a new report – Green Economy Progress Measurement in Jiangsu and Fujian Province, China – released by the Partnership for Action on Green Economy (PAGE).
Using the Green Economy Progress (GEP) Measurement Framework, the report shows overall progress of green development in the two provinces, but with varied success across some of framework’s dimensions and indicators.
The renewable resource supply indicator, for example, is a top scorer in Jiangsu. Its percentage increased annually, reaching 8.2% in 2017. Yet it still has a great potential, compared to the 15% target of renewables in China’s energy mix in 2020. Other indicators that showed progress are green innovation, energy use, income, social security and greenhouse gas emissions, which are all included in the country's Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016-2020).
Jiangsu also shows progress in some other areas, namely nitrogen emissions and air pollution, but is still below expectations. In addition, some cities in Jiangsu failed to reach the expected target when it comes to freshwater withdrawal. Professor Zhang Bing of Nanjing University, one of the principal authors, suggests to build on existing policies on increasing water use efficiency to save water resources. Moreover, most of the province’s cities did not perform so well under the land use indicator, with the report proposing that the province should strike a balance between the agricultural and commercial use of land and slow down loss of farmlands.
Fujian, on the other hand, improved when it came to freshwater withdrawal and land use. This could be a result of the province taking a number of actions on protecting drinking water sources and a policy focus on food security during the evaluation period. But progress was not as on energy use, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and even regressed in renewable. resource supply. A set of policy recommendations focusing on increasing renewable energy share and energy efficiency for air pollution control and GHG reduction are therefore introduced in the report by Professor Huang Maoxing from Fujian Normal University, another principal author.
The China-focused report follows a synthesis of green economy indicators in Ghana, Mauritius and Uruguay. A deep dive into the case study of Mauritius and green economy policymaking can be found in this webinar. Another country application in South Africa is currently underway.
On the national level, these metrics and measurement frameworks developed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and partners complement with country-specific indicators and accommodates to each country’s level of development. By measuring the progress in achieving national priorities, it provides an evidence-based analysis to inform policymaking. Moreover, these country cases also make it possible to compare countries’ efforts and monitor progress in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Countries, however, share similar challenges when implementing this tool, including lack of data availability and data existence. For example, some data on green investments is not publicly available. Moreover, further inclusion of social data, such as green jobs, is often considered to be necessary during the researches.
Since data is the cornerstone of the GEP measurement framework, it is crucial to investigate how big data and digitalization could contribute to the indicators work and eventually more informed decision-making.
The GEP methodology, in short, analyses progress by comparing data from different time series and the targets set in governmental documents (e.g. national development plans). The data source are usually yearbooks from National Statistics Offices and other line ministries, as they are the major source of public data that is accurate and that can be obtained continuously. Consequently, this analysis could only be conducted after the raw data is collected and cleared by these government offices.
Meanwhile, the expansion of digital infrastructure enables an increasingly large amount of data being collected from smart metres and devices, stored in clouds and data centres, transmitted though 5G and analysed by artificial intelligence. It is paving the way for an upgrade of the traditional way of statistics and analysis.
In fact, all steps along the data value chain would need to be reimagined to fully capture the value of data. Challenges remain as the National Statistics Offices and research institutes often do not have the capacity to collect, clear, treat and analyse the whole spectrum of big data alone that involves multidisciplinary knowledge and skills such as ICT, data mining, statistical inference, etc. Going forward, it would require collaboration among line ministries, enterprises, and research institutes, as well as forming partnerships among governments and international organizations.
As a first step towards the collective efforts among different parties on better data utilization, Nanjing University, the implementing partner of the GEP measurement framework in China, has developed an online data platform of green economy indicators that will continuously collect and monitor the GEP of Jiangsu Province. This open-source database also welcomes contributions and inquiries from all other stakeholders from the public and private sectors to bring forward the green development in and outside Jiangsu.