China and Global Climate Governance at COP29 and Beyond

Since 2022, I have attended the annual Conferences of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), known by the acronym COP, as part of Penn’s delegation. One of my primary interests has been following China’s role in global climate governance, the subject of an undergraduate class I teach for Penn’s Department of Political Science. This role has shifted noticeably over the past few years, both from mitigation to adaptation, and in response to growing geopolitical tensions, especially with the United States.

This post briefly reviews how these changes in China’s role shaped the COP29 climate talks and its signature outcome, a New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on climate finance.  

As the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China’s importance to the climate negotiation process needs little introduction. For most of the 2010s, negotiations were consumed by the question of whether and how China would contribute to mitigation efforts.

Chinese President Xi Jinping answered that question by committing to slash China’s carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2060. Since then, the focus of the international talks has turned to adaptation and finance. Yet despite this shift, China remains central to international climate policy thanks to growing demands that it boost contributions to climate finance.

A central principle to the UNFCCC is “common but differentiated responsibility,” or CBDR, meaning that while all countries have some responsibility for addressing climate change, some countries should shoulder more of the burden than others.

CBDR has historically been interpreted as obliging developed nations to pay for most of the cost of mitigating and adapting to climate change, including the harm suffered by the most vulnerable countries. Developing countries like China, while free to contribute voluntarily to climate finance, were seen as having no such obligation.

This historical interpretation has come under strain for three main reasons, all stemming from China’s break-neck growth in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

• China’s emissions grew so quicky during this period that by 2023 they had exceeded the historical totals of every other country except the United States.
• China became the world’s second-largest economy, with per-capita income levels considerably higher than most other large developing countries.
• Growing geopolitical tensions with major powers, especially the United States, led to calls that China should be forced to abandon its developing-country status and contribute much more financing to address shared global challenges like climate change.

At COP27 in 2022, these China-related forces converged to create an unlikely coalition between the United States, the European Union, and small island developing states on an issue known as loss and damage. Developed countries had historically opposed committing funds for loss and damage. In advance of COP27, though, they found agreement with small island developing states that China, too, should be called upon to contribute.

Thanks to this meeting of the minds, the COP27 did in fact create a new loss and damage fund—but with provisions designed to ensure that China did not benefit from it.

The inflection of China-linked geopolitics was equally apparent at COP29. Less developed countries were noticeably more vocal in their insistence that China and India should no longer be put in the same category as other developing nations.

China, though, appeared to have succeeded in pushing back on such suggestions, hewing instead to the more traditional claim that it has no obligation to contribute to multilateral climate finance. The COP29 decision text merely “invites” developing nations to make “additional contributions, including through South-South cooperation,” a term China often uses to describe its climate finance contributions.

Even so, conversations at COP29 also suggested that expectations for China to contribute more to climate finance were likely to grow if the United States again withdraws from the Paris Agreement.

It remains to be seen how Beijing will respond to this pressure; it has historically seen itself as first among equals within the UNFCCC’s developing country caucuses, but has been equally insistent in upholding the principle of CBDR in which developed countries should take the lead on climate finance and adaptation as well as mitigation.       

The tension between China’s economic and geopolitical heft and its developing country status appears unsustainable within the UNFCCC. However, should China be induced to relax its insistence on CBDR and enhance its commitments to multilateral climate finance, the consequences could be far-reaching.

China’s developing country status in other multilateral fora, including international financial institutions, may also be called into question, and it may also have implications for China’s trade relations with other countries. The net result would almost certainly be calls for China to contribute more to a wide range of multilateral causes. Yet it is hard to see the UNFCCC process making much additional progress on climate finance without enhanced contributions from China and other large developing countries.

In sum, China was unsurprisingly central to the COP29 climate talks and is sure to be similarly influential at COP30. I look forward to continuing to follow China’s role next year in Brazil and beyond.

Scott Moore

Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives

Scott Moore is a former senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and the Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives. He is also a practice professor of political science.