By Colleen Howe
BEIJING, Oct 29 (Reuters) – China’s clean technology exports this year will cut carbon emissions outside its borders by an amount equivalent to Brazil’s annual emissions from consuming fossil fuels, an analysis finds, ahead of next month’s COP31 climate summit.
China’s exports of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and batteries will help the world to avoid 450 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions, according to the analysis by the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
The avoided emissions are equivalent to 2% of the world’s annual emissions outside China, which dominates clean energy supply chains from electric vehicles to lithium batteries.
China is the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide overall, but the US is the biggest per capita emitter and also the biggest historical producer of greenhouse gases. Brazil is a top-10 emitter.
China’s clean technology exports are helping the world to avoid emissions especially in the Global South, where they are decarbonising fossil-heavy grids, the analysis found.
The impact of those exports is growing — avoided emissions are up from 370 million tons of CO2 last year, more than the UK emitted from fossil fuel consumption.
The bulk of the avoided emissions came from countries in the Global South, as they have increased imports from China and cleaned up dirty power grids, the analysis found. Many are in sunny regions with rich potential for solar power, by far the biggest source of avoided emissions among China’s exports.
The climate savings outweighed the carbon dioxide emitted in manufacturing the solar panels, turbines and other equipment, the report said, estimating it took around six months for clean tech imports to “pay back” the manufacturing emissions.
The amount of avoided emissions over the lifetime of the equipment exported from China in 2026, which in the case of wind and solar farms can be used for decades, is forecast at 8,400 million tons of CO2 — as much as the US and India together emit in a year from fossil fuels, the report said.
Despite global concerns about China’s industrial overcapacity and its impact on manufacturers in other countries, the analysis found that China’s clean tech exports have, in the aggregate, created new markets rather than displacing existing producers.
However, the surge in green exports drove down per-unit prices and cut into the revenues of incumbent producers.
China has labeled clean tech tariffs the new problem for climate action and vowed to push back against them at COP31.
(Reporting by Colleen Howe; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)
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