I wrote a story for the World Watch Institute website today:

“Climate negotiations are the most important international negotiations after the WTO.” At least this is what Ji Zou, a professor of environmental economics at the People’s University of China in Beijing, believes. In the summer of 2000, Zhou, then 39, received an official letter from China’s Office of the National Coordination Committee on Climate Change (ONCCCC) inviting him to join the country’s climate delegation.

That September, as a Chinese delegation member, Zou attended a session of the Subsidiary Body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Lyon, France. He witnessed a phenomenal scene: Lionel Jospin, then Prime Minister of France, suggested that the more than 1,700 delegates in the room stand up and mourn for an old Chinese man.

That man was Shukong Zhong, who had passed away from an illness three months earlier. To the Chinese public, Shukong Zhong is a fairly unknown name. But to Chinese climate negotiators, his name is symbolic. “Mr. Zhong and other negotiators of the older generations have left us a precious political legacy,” Zou commented.

Zhong had been an interpreter for Zhou Enlai, the former Chinese premier and veteran diplomat during the Mao era. Zhong was also one of the first Chinese representatives to participate in international climate negotiations. When Ji Zou was doing a research internship at the European Commission’s Environment Directorate, his boss Jose Delbeke mentioned Zhong many times, noting that while the Chinese representative had a tough stance and was a stubborn opponent, he also elicited a great deal of respect from his rivals.

Lv Xuedu, deputy director of the Office of Global Environmental Affairs under China’s Ministry of Science, still remembers negotiations at the third Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, which Zhong also attended. When the delegation from New Zealand proposed a motion to discuss emissions reductions by developing countries, Zhong asked for permission to speak right away and refuted the motion. Following him, delegates from more than 40 developing countries spoke, and vetoed the motion. Reporting on the tense atmosphere at the conference, the Washington Post quoted Zhong as saying, “Every two people in developed countries have a car, while you don’t even want us to ride a bus!”

The International Energy Agency now estimates that China will surpass the United States to become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG) by 2009. Industrialized countries are increasingly demanding that China participate in emissions reduction strategies. In November 2006, at the 12th Conference of the Parties to UNFCCC in Nairobi, Kenya, an Australian research institute declared that if China did not reduce its emissions, Australia would not either. Gao Guangsheng, director of China’s ONCCCC, responded that the Chinese population was 65 times that of Australia, and if the GHG emissions of Australia were multiplied by this much, it too would rank first in emissions.

The pressure China now faces to tackle its emissions is also reflected in the upcoming report of the Third Working Group to the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Pan Jiahua, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who is co-authoring the report, has noted that the document is expected to include statements that clearly target China, noting for example that “the newly installed power generation capacity is mainly in developing countries.” The fourth IPCC Assessment will serve as the major scientific basis for climate negotiations in the years ahead.

Facing pressure from industrialized countries, Zou lost his composure at the negotiation table once, exclaiming: “It costs several tens of thousands of RMB for me to come here, and the money is enough for a Chinese peasant to live for several years. What am I here for? I’m here on behalf of the common citizens of China. You should go to China, and see with your own eyes how many people still cannot afford an air conditioner in the summer and heating in the winter. To improve their living standards means to emit more. This emission is for daily necessities, not for luxuries!"

Zou observes that while those international negotiations were very intense, when the delegation returned to China, they discovered that many people, including decision-makers, were not really concerned about climate change, and were not fully aware of its potential effects. “Enterprises in particular lack interest,” he explained. “No matter whether they are state owned or private, they lag far behind foreign enterprises, and their strategic awareness is far from the same level. During negotiations, many foreign enterprises send professional lobbyists to actively influence the rules of the game, but Chinese enterprises are rarely seen.”

Climate negotiations are still ongoing, and remain heated. The Kyoto Protocol stipulates the emissions reductions obligations only for industrialized countries by 2012, and countries must continue discussions for the post-Kyoto era. Another topic that requires further negotiation under the UNFCCC is the issue of technology transfer, which also made little progress at the Nairobi conference.

Zou believes that if industrialized countries choose not to transfer advanced technologies to the developing world, then the high GHG emissions of developing countries, which are using older technologies for their massive infrastructure construction efforts, will remain unchanged for the next several decades. The world will squander the best chance it has to correct the mistake, he says.

To Zou, the true nature of climate negotiations is to redistribute the increasingly rare capacity of the atmosphere to handle rising global GHG emissions. While the demarcation of the planet’s national boundaries has more or less ended in the last few centuries, the partition of environmental resources has just begun. “This is a negotiation with no end,” he says.

Hujun Li is a Beijing-based journalist. From 2003–04, he served as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.