When Donald Trump was sworn in as US President, he immediately signed an executive order beginning the process of withdrawing the country from the Paris Agreement – the global pact aimed at limiting global warming and slowing climate change.
Since then, the US administration has reversed major domestic and international climate measures, cut clean energy programs and dismantled emissions regulations.
Trump’s actions mark a clear retreat from the US’s previous international climate commitments. The world’s largest economy played a key role in the landmark Paris climate accord under Barack Obama, while Joe Biden passed an ambitious legislative package to boost green energy and cut emissions domestically.
But America’s move away from climate action has opened the door for other countries to fill the void, and attention has increasingly turned to the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter – China.
China may not seem like an obvious candidate to assume climate leadership responsibility. It still builds highly polluting coal-fired power plants to meet growing energy demand. But the Asian superpower has also emerged as a clean energy giant.
“It is producing most of the world’s clean tech products that need to decarbonize,” said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the US-based Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI).
“Calling Beijing a climate laggard may mean realizing too late that Chinese companies are already far ahead of their Western counterparts in the clean tech sector,” he told DW.
China dominates the clean energy market
China now produces more than 85% of the world’s solar panels and dominates the electric vehicle (EV) and energy storage markets. In 2024 alone, it is expected to invest $625 billion (€538 billion) in clean technology – the most of any country.
“It took about 20 years before the realization that clean technology was strategic and that they could use their expertise and industrial skills to work hard on these areas and get themselves a strategic advantage,” said Chris Aylett, research fellow at the Center for Environment and Society at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.
The strategy was successful. Clean energy industries contributed about a quarter of China’s GDP growth last year and that figure could double over the next decade.
This is partly due to a growing global shift towards clean energy that is boosting demand for technology and equipment, said Mui Yang, senior energy analyst for Asia at global energy think tank Amber.
“China can actually meet that demand by providing cheaper and more innovative technology,” he told DW. He said this not only advances China’s own transition but also facilitates change around the world.
China’s influence is spreading in the Global South
China’s domestic renewable capacity has grown, with wind and solar energy alone expected to meet 84% of new electricity demand in 2024. Its impact is particularly visible in countries in the Global South, whose solar panel imports from China rose 32% in a single year – outpacing shipments to the Global North.
Countries importing clean technology from the world’s second-largest economy include major emerging markets such as Brazil, Mexico and Pakistan, with Southeast Asia and across Africa also seeing rapid growth.
Aylett said that while these green energy imports help countries meet climate goals, “more practical” considerations are likely driving the trend.
“It’s great for energy security,” he said, adding that countries are probably thinking, “We don’t really want to import oil and gas. It’s volatile and we don’t know where it’s coming from and we can’t be sure about the suppliers.”
Overall, the increase in Chinese renewable technology exports has had a measurable impact, helping to reduce global carbon emissions by 1% in 2024.
Overachievement of ‘ambitious’ targets
But it is not all positive. Observers have criticized China’s emissions reduction targets as not being ambitious.
Global emissions have reached record highs this year, fueled by extreme weather conditions around the world. Scientists now warn that by the early 2030s, the world is likely to exceed the 1.5 °C (2.7 Fahrenheit) threshold, causing potentially irreversible climate damage.
Under the Paris Agreement, countries are committed to limiting global temperature rise to well below 2C and stepping up efforts to keep temperatures below 1.5C. To stay on track, countries are obliged to submit new emissions reduction targets every five years.
But the targets recently presented by China, which promise to cut overall greenhouse gas emissions by 7-10%, fall far short of what is needed to prevent catastrophic levels of global warming.
However, the country has a history of underpromising and overdelivering on its climate goals.
While the figures may seem unambiguous, “if you look beneath it, you can see all these changes that constitute the actions needed to achieve those goals,” Aylett told DW.
In 2020, China’s President Xi Jinping promised that the country would reach peak emissions levels by the end of the decade – a goal experts believe has been achieved, or is close to being achieved, five years early.
Yang said the delivery of its first full greenhouse gas emissions reduction target is a positive development.
“These are all positive signs that the transition in the world’s largest energy consumer is accelerating and deepening rather than slowing down, and that’s really good news for the rest of the world,” he told DW.
Leader in international climate diplomacy
Yet, despite its progress, Beijing has not yet emerged as a leader in global climate diplomacy. While deploying renewable energy overseas and funding clean technology “constitutes a kind of leadership,” Aylett said there is a “reluctance” to officially take on that charge.
He added, “I don’t know if it’s a concept they’re particularly comfortable with.”
Instead, Amber’s Yang described China’s climate efforts as primarily focused on accelerating its own transition and a “lead by example” approach.
Officially, China continues to encourage US engagement on climate. At the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Li Gao, head of the Chinese delegation, expressed hope that the country will return to climate talks.
Gao said, “Paying attention to climate change is something every country needs. We hope that someday, and we also believe that America will come back someday in the future.”
Edited by: Jennifer Collins