Climate change mitigation and green transformation in China.

Limiting global warming to below 2 °C or 1.5 °C (relative to pre-industrial levels) has been broadly accepted as the long-term target to avert unbearable climate damages (IPCC 2018). To fulfill this climate goal, the world must rapidly reduce GHG emissions (mainly carbon emissions) to or below zero, which relies on implementing concrete emissions control policies and a green transformation (Rogelj et al. 2015), thus imposing severe challenges for countries at all development stages. As one of the fastest-growing economies, China emitted about 10 billion tons of CO2 in 2019, over 28% of global emissions (BP. 2020). Despite a slight decline in 2020, China’s carbon emissions are likely to increase again in the post-COVID-19 era (Le Quere et al. 2021). In 2015, China pledged to peak its carbon emissions by 2030 in its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) for the Paris Agreement. In 2020, China updated its climate targets with greater ambitions—a commitment to neutralize its CO2 emissions by 2060. Thus, it is crucial to investigate the design, implementation, and impacts of China’s climate policies, also providing valuable insights for climate governance in other regions. In the recent decades, several policies have helped China achieve its previous climate target, i.e., reducing its carbon intensity by 40–45% in 2020 relative to the 2005 level (Tang et al. 2019). These policies include the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables (Duan et al. 2019), energy saving associated with efficiency enhancement (Huang et al. 2019), as well as economic transformation by total factor productivity (TFP) improvement (Yang et al. 2021). In the meantime, emerging climate policies such as carbon pricing and renewable energy incentives are expected to play an increasingly important role in reaching ambitious long-term goals (Yuan et al. 2020). With the development of big-data processing and computing technologies, the impacts of these energy and climate policies can be simulated and analyzed using various methodologies, including top-down general equilibrium models (Wu et al. 2020; Yuan et al. 2020), bottom-up technology aggregated models (Wang et al. 2020), climate-economic integrated models (Newbold and Marten 2014; Duan et al. 2019), and state-of-the-art decomposition methods (Chen et al. 2020). These methodologies need to be refined to help assessing different policy goals, particularly given multiple uncertainties (Otto et al. 2015). At the backdrop of these points, we initiated this Topical Collection, which includes six papers. The topics of the selected papers range from relationships between CO2 emissions and economic growth, policy and technology options for green transformation, to spatial inequality of capital distribution towards sustainability all embedded within the context of addressing global climate change from the regional perspective of the world’s largest emitter.