Climate change in China and China’s policies and actions for addressing climate change

Abstract

Since the first assessment report (FAR) of Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990, the international scientific community has made sub- stantial progresses in climate change sciences. Changes in components of climate sys- tem, including the atmosphere, oceans and cryosphere, indicate that global warming is unequivocal. Instrumental records demonstrate that the global mean temperature has a significant increasing trend during the 20 th century and in the latest 50 years the warm- ing become faster. In the meantime, the global sea level has a strong increasing trend, as well as the snow coverage of Northern Hemisphere showed an obvious downward trend. Moreover, the global warming plays a key role in significantly affecting the climate sys- tem and social-economy on both global and regional scales, such as sea level rise, melting of mountain glaciers and ice sheets, desertification, deforestation, increase of weather extremes (typhoon, hurricane and rainstorm) and so on. The state of the art understanding of IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20 th century is very likely due to the observed increase in the concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Climate change issues, as a grave challenge to the sustainable development of the human society, have received ever greater attention from the international community. Deeply cognizant of the complexity and extensive influence of these issues and fully aware of the arduousness and urgency of the task of addressing climate change, the Chinese gov- ernment is determined to address climate change in the process of pursuing sustainable development. The facts of climate change in China and its impacts, and China's policies and actions for addressing climate change are introduced in this paper. 1 The climate change in China China locates in the southeastern part of the Eurasian Continent, the largest continent in the world and lies to the west of the Pacific, the world's largest ocean. Due to its great interior extent, the climate of China is dominated by totally different dry continental and wet monsoon climate. The geographic feature of the high topography in the west and the low relief in the east of China favors the features that most parts of the country have a seasonal precipitation and temperature variations that is noticeably larger than other continental regions at the same latitude over Northern Hemisphere.