Can China keep its climate promises?

China can easily meet its Paris climate pledge to peak its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but sourcing 20 per cent of its energy needs from renewables and nuclear power by that date may be considerably harder, researchers said Tuesday.

Tripling the share of non-fossil fuels will require a major overhaul of China's recalcitrant power sector and the full deployment of a fledgling emissions trading system, they said in the journal Nature Communications.

There is a lot at stake.

If the world's top carbon polluter fails to achieve these and other voluntary targets, the 2015 treaty's cornerstone goal of capping global warming at "well below" two degrees Celsius may remain out of reach.

On current trajectories, the planet is set to warm twice that much by century's end.

China has also pledged to expand carbon-absorbing forests by 4,500 square kilometres before 2030, compared to 2005 levels.

"China is on track to achieve its climate commitments," lead author Kelly Sims, director of The Fletcher School's Climate Policy Lab at Tufts University, told AFP.

"It is not pulling back from implementing the Paris Agreement even though US President Donald Trump signalled his intention to do so." Over the last decade, China has positioned itself as a global leader on climate action, enacting a raft of policies to slow the growth of its carbon footprint and, eventually, make it shrink.

Global warming, however, has not always been the main -- or even the primary -- target.

"The vast majority of China's policies have co-benefits for energy security, economic reform and reduced ground-level pollution," Sims told AFP.

More than a million -- up to 2.8 million, according to a recent study -- premature deaths in China each year are attributed to foul air.

The only major climate policy exclusively aimed at reducing CO2 levels is China's emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Introduced in 2017, it is set to cover more than 1,700 power companies and some three billion tonnes in greenhouse gas emissions.

China's total emissions in 2018 topped 10 billion tonnes of CO2, well over a quarter of the world total.

Driving up the price of carbon within the ETS and boosting the share of renewables in China's electricity grid will both depend on revamping the country's power sector, the study said.

"The main challenge is completing power sector reform," said Sims.

"There is political resistance from owners of existing coal plants, and from the provinces with major coal production and coal use."
The Carbon Action Tracker, which evaluates the CO2 reduction efforts in relation to capacity, has labelled Beijing's "highly insufficient."