Chinese President Xi Jinping announced an updated climate action plan under the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, underscoring China’s commitment in addressing climate change. In a video speech to the United Nations Climate Summit 2025 in New York , Xi said that China will, by 2035, reduce economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions by 7% to 10% from peak levels. The country also aims to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in total energy consumption to over 30% and expand the installed capacity of wind and solar power to more than six times the 2020 levels, bringing the total to 3,600 gigawatt, he said. By that time, Xi added, China’s total forest stock will exceed 24 billion cubic meters, and new energy vehicles will dominate new vehicle sales. China’s national carbon emissions trading market will be expanded to cover major high-emission sectors, and a climate-adaptive society will be basically established, he said.
The targets Xi announced are inscribed in China’s new Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) part of a climate action plan under the Paris accord to cut greenhouse gas emissions to keep the rise in global temperatures this century below 2°C above pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. Zhang Haibin, Associate Dean of Peking University’s School of International Studies, said that China’s NDC update once again sends a strong and clear signal that the country is an active participant, contributor and trailblazer in global climate governance. A statement from the National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation said that the NDC update represents the first time China has proposed a comprehensive set of post-2030 climate targets encompassing the entire economy and aiming for net reductions across all greenhouse gases.
Wang Can, Director of the Joint Pollution Control and Carbon Reduction Research Center at Tsinghua University’s Institute for Carbon Neutrality, said the aggregated ambition of current NDCs is far from sufficient to meet the targets under the Paris Agreement. “If all countries fully implement their NDCs, global emissions could be reduced by -1% to 7% by 2030 and 4% to 13% by 2035 compared to 2019 levels, far from the Paris Agreement aligned mitigation pathway,” he said, as reported by the China Daily.
