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International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)

China’s transition to a green economy has immense implications for sustainable development both domestically and worldwide. Yet China’s green economy policies, concepts and actors still remain poorly understood in the emerging international discourse on the green economy.

This report serves as an introductory guide to China’s green economy thinking by i) tracing the evolution of China’s green economy thinking of the last 40 years, ii) mapping key macro policies that shape China’s green economy prospects today, iii) identifying relevant sectoral policies and players in finance, environmental industry, energy, forestry, urbanisation and industrial production, and iv) examining stakeholder groups, unique traits and areas for further exploration.

International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD)

China’s introduction of a national ETS, scheduled for 2017, is an important development in the expanding carbon market landscape. As countries move towards implementation of the recently-adopted Paris Agreement, this sends a powerful signal about China’s mitigation commitment and support for carbon markets. As the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and a key player in world trade, China’s move to a nation-wide ETS can have significant implications for the future of carbon markets around the world.

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

This report compares Green Public Procurement (GPP) programs from four leading Asian countries (China, Japan, Korea and Thailand) to understand what the frameworks and key success factors that result in high-impact green and sustainable procurement are. It looks at their commonalities and differences with the goal of informing a more effective implementation of green procurement policies and programs across Asia. It will be beneficial for other countries in the early stages of promoting and implementing green public procurement, and it will give practitioners insights into the tools and approaches used to implement and promote it. 

Jawaharlal Nehru University

Low carbon development has gained policy prominence and is a concern of both environment and development policy globally and in China and India. This paper discusses the role of China and India as important global actors in light of development imperatives in the two countries. The article then looks at emerging approaches in the two countries related to financing, science, technology & innovation policy, and sub-national actions. The objective is to review efforts in China and India for contributing to learning experiences for other countries. The final section discussed the ways forward in terms of examining the role of China and India in terms of national policy strengthening as well as in global agenda setting. Implementation of sub-national initiatives in both countries faces challenges due to lack of adequate financing as well as knowledge such as greenhouse gas inventories and disaggregated resource and socio-economic assessments.

Journal of Cleaner Production (Elsevier)

The concept of a green economy has been advocated globally ever since it was first proposed. In China, green economy has been adopted as the national strategy for future economic development. In this paper, the authors applied statistical description, grey correlation, proportion and elastic coefficient analysis to assess contributions of green industry to the national development from 2008 to 2012. They find that: (1) The average green degree of China's economic industry, 45%, was relatively low. The relative green degrees from high to low were 65% for service industry, 55% for agriculture industry, and 24% for manufacturing industry, respectively. (2) The share that added values of green industry took up gross domestic product (GDP) was between 41% and 48%. Green industry growth was highly correlated to the national economic growth evidenced by their grey correlation coefficient of 0.8532. (3) Both categories and quantities of green products were increasing annually and the growth rate of exported green products exceeded 50% during the study period. The gross domestic product grew by 0.04% owing to the increase of 1% in green product exports.