5th Five-Year Plan to boost green fight

During an inspection tour of a rural river in Hunan province in 2022, several years after China implemented the lifetime accountability measures for eco-environmental damages for local officials, making them directly responsible for any ecological misgovernance committed on their watch, a prefecture Party secretary responsible for the river pointed with pride at the good work and exclaimed, “The countryside is red and green!”

China has upgraded the lifetime accountability system, from a single-point approach to system-wide governance, expanding the framework from post-event accountability to full-cycle management, forming a closed-loop responsibility system.

China began to systematically plan its national environmental strategies following the landmark United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. This conference, inspiring “China’s Agenda 21: White Paper on China’s Population, Environment and Development in the 21st Century” (1994), is now regarded as a visionary shift in development philosophy, bearing its first fruits in the 10th Five-Year Plan (2001-05), which clearly established sustainable development as a national strategy.

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Major steps forward came with the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-10), which set binding targets to reduce energy consumption per unit of GDP by about 20 percent and total major pollutant emissions by 10 percent.

This brings us to the new era. The 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15) was designated as the first “green development plan”, proposing a systematic green development strategy and expanding associated ecological indicators. 

It was during this period that China saw the lifetime accountability measures implemented for eco-environmental damages and a corner turned in major cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, which had experienced air pollution peaks in 2013.

Thereafter, in the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), green development became a primary theme. The plan specifically included the goal of “overall improvement in ecological and environmental quality” and moved to integrate green values with all aspects of economic and social development.

This set the stage for the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) and its task of promoting the comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development, formulating an action plan for peaking carbon emissions before 2030 and advancing the battle against pollution.

Reviewing some of the key green achievements that previous plans have helped produce through the years, it is clear why they have been described as helping produce a systematic and comprehensive carbon reduction top-level design and policy system.

China has established the world’s largest and fastest-growing renewable energy system. It has become the global leader in electric vehicles, batteries and charging networks.

As of September, non-fossil energy accounted for over 60 percent of China’s total installed power generation capacity.

According to a report submitted to China’s top lawmakers in April, the nation saw steady progress in air quality in 2024, as the proportion of days with good air quality reached 87.2 percent, up 1.7 percentage points from the previous year, while the proportion of heavily polluted days fell by 0.7 percentage points to 0.9 percent. All the environmental quality improvement targets for 2024 were met, surpassing the scheduled progress outlined in the 14th Five-Year Plan.

Over this same period, China also committed to the dual carbon goals of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality before 2060, which are supported by the establishment of the world’s largest carbon market in 2021.

In September, Beijing set out its new 2035 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), declaring that “China will, by 2035, reduce economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions by 7 percent to 10 percent from peak levels, striving to do better …” This marks a major strategic shift, China’s first absolute emissions reduction target covering the entire economy and including all greenhouse gases, not just carbon dioxide. It is estimated that achieving these targets will require cutting over 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

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Furthermore, China aims to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in total energy consumption to more than 30 percent by 2035, expanding the installed capacity of wind and solar power to be about 3.6 billion kilowatts, over six times the 2020 level. These are a few of the key targets, intended to produce a climate-adaptive society by 2035, one that is capable of climate resilience, including preventing disasters associated with growing incidences of extreme weather, as well as sustaining economic development and national rejuvenation.

The 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30) will take decisive steps toward realizing key green targets, including those highlighted by the NDCs. Indeed, the Communist Party of China Central Committee’s recently unveiled recommendations for formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan emphasize implementing a dual-control system for both carbon emissions intensity and total volume, deepening energy-saving and carbon-reduction renovations, and promoting the green and low-carbon transformation of the energy system.

All these initiatives show that China is continuing to take greater steps toward building a community with a shared future for humanity, ensuring the grass is greener all the way down to the grassroots. Other countries should work with China to build a green future.

The author is a professor of politics and international relations and the director of the Center for Ecological Civilization at East China Normal University in Shanghai. The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. 

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.