China’s emissions may be overestimated
Print Edition
INTERNATIONAL organizations could be overestimating emissions from China, one of the world’s biggest producers of greenhouse gas, because of problems in the way they calculate their data, according to a study published in the latest issue of Nature.
With talks on a new global climate accord set to take place in Paris in December, China has promised to bring emissions to a peak by “around 2030,” but it is unclear how much CO2 China is producing and how much it will produce in 15 years.
While there is no official figure for Chinese carbon emissions last year, estimates stand at 9-10 billion tons, while forecasts for 2030 range anywhere between 11 billion and 20 billion tons.
“Without an accurate baseline, any target will become a number-crunching game,” said Dabo Guan, of the University of East Anglia, one of the authors of the study.
The paper said organizations such as the European Union’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR)have overestimated China’s emissions by as much as 14 percent by using default conversion rates that should not apply in China.
“The main difference in our paper is for the first time we have taken fuel quality into consideration, which is missing from other estimates,” said Guan.
Taking into account China’s lower quality coal, the study calculated China’s 2013 carbon emissions at 9.13 billion tons, below the EDGAR figure and 5.6 percent lower than an estimate in oil major BP’s statistical yearbook.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends a default “emission factor” of 0.713 tons of carbon for every ton of coal produced, but the Nature authors, looking at around 600 samples from domestic mines, said the figure in China should be closer to 0.518 tons.
The study also estimated China produced 2.9 gigatons less carbon dioxide than previous estimates over 2000-2013, although Chinese government researchers said it might have overestimated lower-grade coal consumption over the period.
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