DgcityChina has released a national action plan to make resource conservation a driver of its green transition, setting binding-style targets for cutting waste across energy, water, land and materials through the rest of the decade.
Under the plan, issued by the National Development and Reform Commission, the industry ministry and three other departments, China aims to reduce energy consumption per unit of GDP by about 10 percent by 2030 from 2025 levels. Water use per unit of GDP would fall by the same margin, while construction land per unit of GDP would drop by 15 percent.
The document also calls for lower grain losses at every stage of the food chain and raises the annual recycling volume of major recyclable resources to 510 million tonnes by 2030. It sets out seven priority areas, ranging from energy efficiency and water conservation to minerals development, raw-material recycling and building a public culture of thrift.
The plan is more than a waste-reduction exercise. Chinese planners see efficiency gains as one of the cheapest ways to slow the growth of emissions at the source, easing the pressure on a power system that still runs heavily on coal even as solar and wind capacity expand at record pace.
Officials and researchers involved in the plan argue that saving one unit of energy is often cheaper and faster than generating a new one, and that coordinated conservation can cut carbon, reduce pollution and support growth at the same time. Supporting measures include tighter standards, new pricing and policy incentives, stronger oversight and investment in conservation technology.
The five agencies behind the plan will back the targets with updated efficiency standards for buildings, appliances and industrial equipment, along with pricing policies that reward thrift and tighter monitoring of how local governments perform. Technology innovation, from waste-heat recovery to smarter irrigation, is named as a key supporting measure.
The targets fit alongside China’s wider climate commitments of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality before 2060. With the plan covering everything from factory floors to farmland and household habits, Beijing is signaling that meeting those goals will depend as much on using less as on building more clean power.
