The International Energy Agency (IEA 2010) recently reported that China consumed 2.25 × 109 tons of oil equivalents in 2009, i.e., China had become the world’s largest energy consumer. Subsequently, the National Energy Bureau of China stated that the IEA report was inaccurate (Gai 2010). This debate reminds us the two important conferences held in the end of 2009. At the first conference (the Climate Change Conference of United Nations), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2009) stated that global climate changes might be more severe than predicted. Although there is disagreement about the IPCC report (Folster and Nystrom 2010), most scientists believe that climate change is a real and severe challenge and that controlling greenhouse gas emission is the most effective way to reduce global warming (Tollefson 2010). The goal of the second conference (The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference) was to develop a new emissions-reduction timetable. The representative of each country balanced the national interest in maintaining economic development against the international need to reduce global warming. The major countries finally made commitments to reduce emissions (Ding et al. 2009). The Sustainable Development Strategy Research Group of Chinese Academy of Sciences found that, during technological advancement, the developed countries greatly increased their C emissions, and in the absence of restrictive policy and resource constraints, per capita C emissions increased with increases in per capita GDP. In part because of the oil crisis in 1970s and the constraints of Kyoto Protocol, per capita and total C emissions have peaked and begun to decline in most developed countries (Wu and Wang 2009; Ding et al. 2009). C emissions per unit of GDP in China are also decreasing, but greater reductions are possible. From 1990 to 2005, China reduced energy consumption per unit of GDP by 47% and C emissions per unit of GDP by 45% (Wu and Wang 2009). Considering stage of development, population growth, increase of per capita consumption, and cost effectiveness, China can better reduce C emissions by reducing energy consumption. Reducing poverty and solving other social problems, however, make it difficult to reduce C emissions. While trying to reduce energy consumption and C emissions per unit of GDP, China has also recognized the value of terrestrial ecosystem management and vegetation restoration for C fixation. The estimated net C fixation of terrestrial ecosystems in China was 3.8–5.2 × 109 tons from 1980 to 2000, equivalent to 30% of the emissions from fossil fuel combustion over the same period (Piao et al. 2009). In 2008 in China, forests covered about 195 million ha (5% of the world total) and plantations covered 62 million ha (29% of the world total) (Ren et al. 2010). About 5.9–6.2 × 109 tons of C is stored in Chinese vegetation (Yu and Li 2009). The total C storage of all forests in China was about 1.5 × 109 tons during 1980–2000, with the afforestation projects between 1970 and 1990 contributing 450 million tons. In 2004 alone, the net absorption of Chinese forests was roughly 500 million tons of CO2 equivalents, accounting for more than 8% of the national greenhouse gas emissions over the same period (Yu and Li 2009). Over the past 10 years, the Chinese government has invested 70 × 109 US dollars in plantation and forest restoration projects (Ren et al. 2010). The potential C fixation of current restoration projects in China is approximately 20 × 109 tons with a duration of about 100 years. In the next 50 years, implementation of forestry projects is expected to increase forest C storage per year by 182–194 million tons (Yu and Li 2009).
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Nov 20, 2013
Tülay Yıldırım 
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