The consistency of China's energy statistics and its implications for climate policy

Abstract

Reliable energy statistics serve as the foundation and starting point for understanding the climate policies of any country. As the most comprehensive sources of energy data for China, China Energy Statistics Yearbooks (ESY), published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), underwent three major revisions since 2005. This paper analyzes how these three major revisions correspond to data on China's energy use from 1996 to 2012, and theirs impacts on CO2 emissions, emission intensity and the share of non-fossil energy in total energy consumption, which are key indicators of China's climate policies. Some notable changes include CO2 emissions for 2012, which increased by 594 Million tons – a figure equivalent to South Korea's annual emissions, which implies that China's emissions at peak level will be higher than previous estimation. Meanwhile, revised emission intensity data show a higher amount and lower decreasing rate, which means that China's achievements in decreasing emission intensity during 2005–2012 have been overestimated, while future difficulties for achieving the goal of 40–45% reduction will be greater. On the share of non-fossil fuel energy in China's total energy mix, the adjustments increased the indicator by 1.26%, reflecting the fact that China's effort in developing non-fossil energy had been underestimated. Discrepancies in reported scattered coal in different statistics versions are the main contributors to these changes. To further enhance the reliability of its energy statistics, and thereby its climate policies, China should remove incentives for misreporting through legal means, and make the technical system for data collection more comprehensive and accurate, with particular emphasis on scattered coal.