You are here  China's Carbon Intensity Target  Last week, China
released a draft of its First National Climate Change
Assessment. The draft mostly focuses on the impacts that China
will likely face due to global warming, but it also reportedly
includes a goal of reducing China's carbon intensity by 40% by
2020, and 80% by 2050. The draft is not official (the official
release of the separate Action Plan has now been indefinitely
delayed), but in any case it signals the first time that China
has considered an emissions target in any form.  GHG intensity
targets like China's specify emissions in terms of production or
consumption, such as GDP or energy use. By contrast, absolute
targets reduce emissions from some absolute level. For example,
emissions targets in the Kyoto Protocol are roughly based on
1990 levels specified in metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2).
Intensity targets often look good on paper: a 40% reduction
sounds pretty good. But the difficult part of an intensity
target is that it's hard to de