Apeer-reviewed open-access journal

BioRisk 9: |—37 (2014) 1 1
doi: 10.3897/biorisk.9.6105 RESEARCH ARTICLE & [3 | O RP IS k

www.pensoftonline.net/biorisk

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or
last best hope for a global ecological civilisation?

Joachim H. Spangenberg!”

| Helmholtz Centre for Environment Research, Department Community Ecology, Theodor-Lieser-Str. 4, 06120
Halle, Germany 2 Correspondence address: Sustainable Europe Research Institute SERI Germany, Vorsterstr.
97, 51103 Kéln-Kalk, Germany

Corresponding author: Joachim H. Spangenberg (Joachim.Spangenberg@ufz.de)

Academic editor: J. Settele | Received 15 August 2013 | Accepted 21 May 2014 | Published 10 June 2014

Citation: Spangenberg JH (2014) China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological
civilisation? BioRisk 9: 1-37. doi: 10.3897/biorisk.9.6105

Abstract

The anthropocene is the age where human influences are determining the development of the planet’s
ecosystems and thus the bio-physical basis of future human civilisations. Today China has become the
world’s largest economy and its worst polluter with per capita greenhouse gas emissions surpassing the EU
average, the world’s largest consumer of all kinds of resources. Even regarding the aggregate contribution
to climate change (historical emission residues included), called the climate debt, China has not yet, but
will be most probably climbing the top position rather soon.

At the same time China is the world’s largest victim of environmental change, including air and soil
pollution, water and land scarcity, biodiversity loss and climate change.

Thus not only slowing down the increase but reducing emissions should be a top priority for China, and
it is: the government has taken some bold steps. China is the world’s largest investor in renewable energies,
has the largest afforestation program, and leads the world in reducing carbon dioxide emission reduction.
As the largest polluter it has extraordinary opportunities to improve the global state of the environment — is
it the world’s last best hope for establishing a global ecological civilisation? Some implications regarding the
Chinese environmental policy are discussed, some strengths highlighted and some weaknesses identified.

However, despite their magnitude, the efforts—and in particular their implementation—are not yet
sufficient. We suggest three additional steps which could help China to begin reducing its climate debt
within a couple of decades, define a long term perspective for policy planning and adjust its growth model

to the challenges of the anthropocene.

Keywords
China, pollution, climate change, land use, HANPP, biodiversity, ecological debt/climate debt, CO2,

methane, politics, Common but differentiated responsibility, Earth System Science, environmental justice

Copyright J.H. Spangenberg. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution International License
(CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

2 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

Introduction

Naming a new epoch signals earth system change, i.e. a point in time when (ubiq-
uitous) local change in aggregate has begun changing the global system, ending the
previous period in which human civilisation emerged, the Holocene. If the term an-
thropocene was originally proposed as “a strategy for getting the public to appreciate
the extent to which humans were destroying the world” (B. Smith according to Balter
2013), one might consider the beginning of the anthropocene as the time window
when evolutionary adaptability of biodiversity and ecosystems could no longer keep
up with human alterations of the environment(s).

Such a threshold would coincide with escalating anthropogenic energy consumption,
a peak in the human appropriation of net primary production (Erb et al. 2013, Kraus-
mann et al. 2012), with a quantity of materials mobilised by humans, the anthropogenic
material flows, exceeding natural flows (Schmidt-Bleek 1994, Peduzzi 2014), and with
other drastic alterations in ecosystems mainly caused by land use intensification, including
in agro-ecosystems. As a result, humanity as a whole is exceeding the planetary bounda-
ries, leaving the safe operating space of humankind (Rockstrém et al. 2009).

Contemporary changes are very fast, often abrupt, as compared to earlier trans-
formations by agricultural practices which have evolved over centuries or even longer
periods, and thus have offered opportunities for species and species interactions to
co-evolve in cultural landscapes (Settele and Spangenberg 2013). The resulting in
managed equilibrium-type systems were mostly of high value for conservation, sus-
tainable production and/or cultural ecosystem services. Consequently, the speed and
scale of change destabilise the dynamic equilibria characterising the Holocene, and
the Earth system threatens to flip into a new (more or less) stable state less accom-
modating to human civilisations (Rees 1999). Biodiversity loss and climate change
are but the most obvious and pressing symptoms of this process of global environ-
mental change. Thus deceleration of change to gain time for evolution (Settele and
Kihn 2009) and preventing breakdowns in ecosystem services (Heong 2009) would
be key objectives for future-proofing human civilizations and their biological and
agricultural basis in the anthropocene (Settele and Spangenberg 2013).

Section 2 describes in some detail the challenges of the transition to the anthropo-
cene, and the driving forces behind it. Section 3 identifies the most relevant nations,
and China as a key driver of the process. However, China is not only a driver, but
also a major victim of the process, as illustrated in section 4. This insight is growing
rapidly in China itself, and the world’s most populous country and largest economy
rather naturally has not only a moral obligation, but also the capabilities to take
decisive action, beyond the existing policy measures and the ambitious policy goals
already formulated. Thus section 5 asks whether China is our last best hope for sta-
bilising humankind’s survival conditions before crossing severe tipping points of the
global ecosystem. Section 6 suggests three strategic options how to turn China, on
top of its current efforts, from a climate villain into a climate hero. Section 7 offers a
brief outlook.

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 3

The challenge of the Anthropocene

Driving Forces

The 1950s mark the beginning of the modern international era, the decade in which the
modern internationalised world emerged. This is not only testified by the founding of
global institutions like the United Nations Organisation UNO (1947) and the World Bank
(1946), but—at least as important—also by the beginning of official bilateral development
aid programs following the liberation of many so-called Third World countries from colo-
nisation. Even more important in our context, it was the time of the emergence of modern
communication and transport, providing for the first time mass access to telecommunica-
tion, television, cars and air transport (for the 19th century globalisation of communication
and trade see Standage 1998). Both communication and transportation were conditions
for outsourcing and globalising supply chains; together with development aid and foreign
direct investment FDI they induced a rapid global spread of information and innovation
replication (Fischer-Kowalski and Amman 2001). Globally, industrial and labour cultures
began to converge towards a standard developed in the early industrialised countries.
Regarding resource consumption, the 1950s have been described as the great accele-
ration; a phenomenon that started 20 years earlier in the USA and took hold throughout
the industrialised countries, capitalist or socialist, before being transferred to the rest of
the world. Economic growth reached unprecedented levels and became the leitmotif not
only for the industrialised countries and a yardstick in their competition, but also for
their former colonies gaining independence in the 1950s and 1960s. A de-colonising
global economy, the East-West competition for more economic growth (in which the
socilist block was leading in the 1950s - remember the 'Sputink Shock’), escalating con-
sumption in the West in the 1960s, a shift from coal to oil in the affluent countries, and
the Green Revolution coincided, accelerating the global biological and cultural homoge-
nisation. While the outpacing of evolution followed with a certain delay, its reasons are to
be found in this decade and the economic changes it saw emerging in most of the world.
The increasing human impact due to ever faster change had two driving forces—tech-
nological progress, increasing wealth and population growth amplified resource consump-
tion, and the internationalisation of exchange, both communication and trade, led to the
rapid spread of innovations regardless where in the world they had been developed. In
their interplay, they enhanced the speed as much as the scale of change to levels unprec-
edented in earth history—except for the few global catastrophes caused by massive aster-
oids hitting the planet. Physically this development was based on the massive expansion
of energy consumption and the transition from biomass to fossil fuels, first coal and in
the 1950s shifting to oil and later complementing gas. In the early industrialising coun-
tries different patterns of fossil fuel use coincide with certain stages of the transformation
to an industrial society and with changing trajectories of societal development (Fischer-
Kowalski and Amman 2001, Wiedenhofer et al. 2013). Other drivers of change growing
simultaneously with fossil fuel use include the exponentially increasing consumption of
metallic and mineral resources (Schmidt-Bleek 2008). In particular the extent of and the

4 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

changing patterns and growing intensity of land use (Bringezu et al. 2012, Haberl et al.
2009, Spangenberg 2007) played an important role, not least promoted by the green
(grain), the blue (fish) and the white (milk) revolution (Spangenberg 1991). It was in
particular the combination of escalating resource use and these revolutions and their posi-
tive feedback loops which caused, with a time lag, the destabilisation of ecosystems by
overburdening their evolutionary and adaptive capabilities. Thus it was not one big deci-
sive change but the confluence of globally dispersed, ubiquitous accelerated local changes,
synchronised through ideology, technology, power and finance, that caused a massive
qualitative change of the global socio-economic-environmental system as a whole.

Today 15% of the world’s population have successfully completed the transition
from an agrarian to an industrial (and now post-industrial) society, in the course ex-
hausting if not destroying the capacity of global CO, sinks, overburdening the global
nitrogen and phosphorous cycles and—worst of all—accelerating the loss of biodiversity
by a factor 100 and more (Rockstrém et al. 2009). On top of this, 60% of the world’s
current population are undergoing the same transition from agricultural to industrial
societies, so far mainly following the Northern development trajectory. The globalisa-
tion of this "normal development paradigm", from agricultural societies assumed to
be poor to presumably affluent industrial societies, was propelled by national elites
and international financial institutions. As a result, the number of people in absolute
poverty has decreased significantly (while the number of people in plain poverty in-
creased), the majority of them now living in middle income countries. Poverty has
become a social group problem rather than a developing country problem, making
established development concepts obsolete. The solution can no longer be increasing
the wealth of a country, but must include redistribution within countries, usually not
only of income but also of assets, depending on the national situation.

Pressures: Biodiversity loss, climate change and the ecological debt

The agricultural revolutions, by increasing growth in line with extraction (harvest)
did not significantly change the share of natural primary production appropriated by
humankind. Although correlations between HANPP and biodiversity loss have been
described at smaller scales (Haberl et al. 2004), increased human appropriation was
probably not the cause of the disruptions in ecosystem functioning: species loss has
accelerated throughout the globe, while the level of HANPP declined in the indus-
trialised countries and remained rather steady in South East Asia (see Erb et al. 2009
for the global distribution of HANPP and Krausmann et al. 2012 for data from the
Philippines). Nonetheless the steady but very high levels of HANPP can be read as
indicating a high level of anthropogenic pressures on ecosystems (Haber! 2013).
Avoiding an increase in HANPP by increasing external input, however, came at a
cost: the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles were expanded beyond the planetary
boundaries (Rockstém et al. 2009, Krausmann et al. 2012). Intensive, often irrigated
agriculture in particular in Asia (Figure 1), together with urbanisation and industriali-

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 5

Figure |. Agriculture on the Chinese Loess Plateau, 2013.

sation, sent water, energy and mineral consumption skyrocketing, undermined water
availability and quality and turned agriculture from a net energy provider into an en-
ergy consuming industrial sector. This links the agricultural revolutions to the second
major threat to ecosystem stability and sustained ecosystem service provision besides
biodiversity loss, which is of course climate change (Rockstrém et al. 2009). Besides
industrialisation and growing consumption, logging, irrigation agriculture, aquacul-
ture and intensive animal husbandry significantly increased the emission of potent
greenhouse gases like methane (CH,), laughing gas (nitrous oxide N,O) and carbon
dioxide CO,,.

The most important greenhouse gas is CO,, responsible for about half of the
warming effect, followed by CH » causing about 20% of global warming and N,O
with about 6%. Their dynamics are quite different: while CO, has an average atmos-
pheric residence time of about 120 years, methane’s residence time is 9-15 years, while
its radiative forcing (RF) is 25 times higher than that of CO,, but less than that of
N,O (298 times, 114 years). As a result of these differences, the contribution of indi-
vidual gases (and thus of their emitters) to what has been called the climate debt differs
significantly in and between countries. This debt has been defined as the remaining
climate change effect of the accumulated historical emissions of a country, taking both
the RF and the residence time into account (Martinez Alier 2002, Smith et al. 2013).
The climate debt is strongly influenced by recent emissions as they are least subject to
the residence limit effect, and is a key component of the broader ecological debt.

Methane concentrations in the atmosphere have reached three times the pre-in-
dustrial level of about 600 ppb, and continue to rise. Globally, more than 35% are
directly or indirectly caused by cattle breeding and some 15% by other biomass use.

6 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

About half is caused by leakages in extraction, transport and processing of natural gas,
including incomplete combustion during flaring of technically not recoverable gas;
data for methane emissions from hydraulic fracturing are not yet available.

2013 is the year in which atmospheric CO, concentrations crossed the 400 ppm
threshold—up from 349 ppm in 1987, the year the Brundtland report was published
(and the last year when the annual average CO, level was less than 350 ppm, the level
recommended for stabilizing the Holocene climate) and from 356 ppm 1992, at the
time of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. At the Cancun climate negotiations 2011,
the countries of the world agreed to commit to a maximum temperature rise of 2°C
above pre-industrial levels, and to consider lowering that maximum to 1.5° in the near
future. To give a relatively high certainty of not exceeding 2°C, scientists tend to rec-
ommend stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations at about 350 ppm CO,_ by 2050
(IPCC 2014). To achieve this, global GHG emissions have to decline by about 2/3 until
2050, with industrialised countries’ greenhouse gas emissions declining by 4/5 or more
to about 2 t/cap*yr. Fossil fuel consumption would have to be reduced accordingly.
Even remaining below 2°C does not guarantee avoidance of all significant adverse im-
pacts, but if exceed, they are projected to become much more severe, widespread, and
irreversible (for current impacts see EEA 2012); if the current global trend of increasing
CO, emissions continues, cumulative emissions will surpass the 2°C limit within the
next couple of decades. ‘The climate system would then be likely to cross more danger-
ous thresholds that could trigger large-scale catastrophic events (IPCC 2014).

Pursuing a 2:1 chance of limiting global warming to, or below, 2°C above pre-
industrial levels, limits the world’s “carbon budget” (the maximum permissible emis-
sions) to no more than 1.000 Gt (Giga tonnes, 10° metric tonnes) of carbon to be
released into the atmosphere from the beginning of the industrial era to the end of this
century, of which 531 Gt had been emitted by 2011. Factoring in other climate pol-
lutants than carbon dioxide brings the overall cumulative budget 200 Gt down from
the 10'* tonnes of carbon, leaving just 269 Gt of carbon as the remaining budget—the
result of two lost decades (IPCC 2013). The total proven international fossil fuel re-
serves, 2,860 Gt COs according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy
Outlook (IEA 2013), are a multiple of the permissible extraction. Consequently, to
stabilise the environmental conditions of the Holocene, 2/3 to 9/10 of the proven
reserves will have to be left in the ground, as “unburnable carbon” (Meinshausen et
al. 2009) or “unburnable fuel” (The Economist 2013a). Burning all proven reserves
would result in an atmospheric CO, concentration exceeding 550 ppm (and more if
unconventional and so far not economically viable resources were extracted, or new
fossil fuels discovered), and to dire consequences. Thus Peak Oil, although threaten-
ing, will come too late to rescue us from climate change.

Thus, if governments are determined to implement their climate policies, a focus
on efficiency, although important, will not be enough, but capping resource use and
subsequently decreasing it will be required. However, this urgent turnaround is ham-
pered by the fact that most of the fossil fuel reserves are owned by governments or state
energy firms like Gazprom und Rosneft (Russia), Petrobras (Brazil), Pemex (Mexico),

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? is

Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia), or Sinopec, CNPC und CNOOC (China); they con-
tribute significantly to public revenues, about 2*10'' US$ in the OECD countries
and unknown amounts in the emerging economies (Haas 2014). Thus while reserves
would be left in the ground if governments took their own policy objectives seriously
(The Economist 2013a), economic interests dominate. A similar bias is detectable for
private energy companies, representing about a quarter of the world’s fossil reserves:
their shareholders and investors expect a return. Markets are valuing companies as if
all their reserves would be burned, and investors treat reserves as an indicator of future
revenues. [hey therefore require companies to replace reserves depleted by production,
even though this runs afoul of emission-reduction policies. If the reserve replacement
ratio of fossil-fuel firms falls below 100%, their shares tumble down: an analysis by
the UK HSBC bank found that effective climate policy targeted at a maximum of 2°
warming would cut the stock exchange value of Australian mining companies by half.
As a consequence, although companies already have far more oil, gas and coal than
they need (again, assuming temperatures are not to rise by more than 2°C), the 200
largest listed oil, gas and coal companies, with a market capitalisation of 4*10'? US$
at the end of 2012, spent 6.74*10'' US$ on developing new reserves; ExxonMobil
alone planned to spend $3.7*10'° a year on exploration each year 2014-2016 (The
Economist 2013a). This is a squandering of financial resources for securing those fos-
sil reserves necessary to propel CO, emissions above 550 ppm—an intention nobody
admits to have, despite investing billions of dollars for it (Haas 2014).

China the culprit-in a global context

Past economic growth in China has been lifting hundreds of millions of people out of
absolute poverty, and was the main contribution to reaching the UN Millennium De-
velopment Goals MDG at least in some respect. It will make China the world’s largest
economy already next year, in terms of purchasing power adjusted GDP. Purchasing
power parity PPP is calculated by the International Comparison Programme to make
national GDPs comparable despite exchange rate fluctuations and diverging domestic
prices, by counting a hair cut or a bus ride as equivalents in all countries. It’s latest
report, issued April 30", 2014, but based on 2011 data, suggests that China will be
surpassing the USA by 2015 (The Economist 201 4a).

This enormous success has led to a massive increase in resource consumption; Chi-
na’s industries are consuming 40-45% of the world production of copper, steel, nickel,
aluminium and zinc. China today imports half the planet’s tropical logs and raises half
of its pigs (Ihe Economist 2013b), with significant environmental and social impacts
in China and in the countries of origin. At the same time, the massive growth fuelled
an accumulation of wealth not only lifting the poorest out of poverty but also establish-
ing a new class of super-rich, swelling the ranks of the world’s billionaires. Today 358

US$-billionaires, 1/5 of the global total are situated in China (The Economist 2014b).

8 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

Air pollution—the most frequent reason of premature death—and water security
are amongst the best known environmental pressures in China, together with land
devastation by mining and the impacts of intensive agriculture. This, and the logging
of forests from the 1970s to the 1990s, contributed to a massive threat to biodiversity
in China, a megadiverse biodiversity hotspot. However, as these factors, despite their
global relevance, primarily affect China itself, they are discussed in section 3, while in
this section the focus is on global effects, in particular climate change.

In total, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO,)—the main cause of global warm-
ing—increased by 3% in 2011 and 1.4% in 2012. According to the 2013 report “Trends
in global CO, emissions”, released by the EU Joint Research Centre JRC and the Neth-
erlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), the top emitters contributing to the
global 34.5 billion tonnes of CO, in 2012 are: China (29% - only a quarter of the
emissions is for export production, making China still the biggest emitter if embodied
emissions in global trade are factored in), the United States (16%), the European Un-
ion (11%), India (6%), the Russian Federation (5%) and Japan (4%). However, in the
European Union CO, emissions dropped by 1.6% in 2012 to 7.4 tonnes per capita (t/
cap) while in China (without Taiwan) average emissions of CO, increased by 3% to 7.3
t/cap. The increase in China, although low by historical standards, was equivalent to
two-thirds of the net global CO, increase in 2012. Between 2000 and 2012, China has
accounted for about two thirds of the increase in global CO, emissions, living through
the coal and oil phase of development simultaneously; modern energy sources have
surpassed traditional bio-based ones (Haberl et al. 2009, Erb et al. 2009).

As a result, China’s CO, emissions per capita were comparable to those in the EU
and by 2014 most probably have surpassed them, making a reduction of about 70%
per capita a necessary longer term objective for both, China and the EU. China’s CO,
emissions per USD Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are almost double those of the EU
and United States and similar to those of the Russian Federation (Olivier et al. 2013).
The United States remain the second largest emitter of CO,, with 16.4 t/cap, despite a
significant decline due to the recession in 2008-2009, high oil prices and an increased
share of natural gas from fracking (the methane balance of fracking is so far unknown).
Only a few Near East countries such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qa-
tar, and isolated islands like the Falklands/Malvinas have higher emissions per capita
(Olivier et al. 2013). Coal is the most important fuel, in China and globally, and the
most important source of CO, (Figure 2).

The strongest short-term economic effects of effective climate policies phasing out
hard coal use would be felt by the world’s major coal exporters, which in 2012 were
Indonesia with 383 Mt = 32.8%, Australia with 302 Mt = 25.9%, the United States
(106 Mt = 9.1%), Russia (103 Mt = 9.1%), Colombia (7.0%) and South Africa (6.2%)
(IEA 2013). The longer term impacts on producers would arise due to the foregone
income opportunities from mobilising and marketing reserves of hard coal (anthracite,
bituminous and sub-bituminous); here China itself would be affected economically,
holding the world’s 3“ largest coal reserves. Globally, reserves in 2011 were: USA 207.1
Gt (30.0%), Russia 146.6 Mt (21.2%), China 95.9 Gt (13.9%), India 56.1 Gt (8.1%),

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 9

a
ee

i om

are

Figure 2. City power plants contribute to global warming and to local air pollution: Harbin, Heilongji-
ang province (left, 2010) and Taiyuan, Shanxi province (right, 2013).

Australia 39.2 Gt (7%), and Ukraine 3.9 Gt (4.6%) (end-2011 data, WEC 2013). On
the other hand, coal (besides oil) is a major factor in the balance of payments and a
burden for the major importers, all of them in Asia (2012: China Mainland 278 Mt
and 65 Mt Taiwan, Japan 184 Mt, India 158 Mt, South Korea 126 Mt, and Germany
44 Mt)(IEA 2013). Their national economies including the consumption capabilities of
consumers would benefit significantly from saving the money spent on these imports.

The Chinese climate debt looms even larger, and with it the responsibility and
the future (at least moral) obligation for compensation, when methane emissions are
added to the balance. More specifically, in 2005, the last year for which figures are
available (Smith et al. 2013), the USA was responsible for 25.1% of the global climate
debt from fossil fuel incineration (net anthropogenic emissions) and China only for
11.1% (Russia: 8.5%, Germany 5.1%, Japan 4.8%), but regarding methane already
in 2005 the USA/China relation was the opposite. China’s share in methane climate
debt was the world’s largest at 18.4%, while the USA was responsible for 9.6% of the
global accumulated methane based climate debt, followed by India (8.2%), Russia
(7.4%) and Brazil (5.5%). In total (CO, plus CH,) the ranking changed little, but
the distances between countries were shrinking (which most probably has changed
the ranking to the disbenefit of China now, nine years on). The country shares of the
global environmental debt were 18.4% for the USA and 13.8% for China, followed
by Russia (8.0%), India 5.3% and Germany (3.5%).

Add to this the greenhouse gas emissions from land use change and forestry
(LUCF), and the picture changes again: 16.3% of the total climate debt including
all the factors (CO,, CH, and LUCF) were allocated to the USA in 2005, 13.8% to
Europe, 13.4% to China (including Taiwan), and 8.0% to the former Soviet Union
(Smith et al. 2013). In the nine years since China has certainly surpassed Europe and
most probably caught up with the USA’s climate debt level, as the latest emissions are
most effective. As a result, the argument that other countries with a long industrial
history have higher aggregate impacts is no longer valid as in 2014 most probably the
world’s largest climate debt rests with China, and so does the responsibility for climate
impacts around the world. Furthermore, despite its moral plausibility, the argument

10 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

was not ethically valid from the outset as claiming the same right to pollution means
justifying own misbehaviour with others’ misconduct, which is no ethical or moral
legitimation at all. Today, however, China is not playing catch-up anymore; it is by
now doing more damage to the global ecosphere than any other country, with only
1/4 of its CO, and hardly any of its CH, and LUCF emissions resulting from export.

When China started its race to the top, the capacity of the atmosphere was already
half consumed by nations which underwent the industrialisation process earlier, and
by no means any longer available. This justifies a demand on the early industrialis-
ers to set a precedent in emission reduction, but not for any other country to repeat
their mistake and become, in a moral sense, at least as guilty as they are. Any effective
international climate protection policy would have to respect the different situations
(focus on different greenhouse gases and industrial sectors), but also acknowledge the
need for support for countries and regions most affected by structural change due to
the phasing out of fossil fuels. Also for a number of countries national climate adapta-
tion and risk reduction strategies may need external support. Early polluters have a
moral duty to provide such help as part of their wealthy has been built by exploiting
the sources and sinks no longer available to the later arrivals.

China the Victim-—glimpses on impacts the anthropocene has for China

Far from claiming to be comprehensive, this section highlights some of the key pollu-
tion and environmental degradation problems China is struggling with. The transition
from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, of which China is a major driver, is causing
significant challenges domestically. Besides being culprit, China is also a victim.

The burden created throughout the development process is rather unevenly dis-
tributed in the country; economic, social and environmental development are not in a
balance. Provincial improvements in aggregate sustainability indices are in most cases
due to the socio-economic development, most often with deterioration or stagnation
in the environmental dimension (Hara et al. 2009). Those in between, inland but not
distinct border regions, with limited resource endowments and semi-stable environ-
ments suffer most in environmental terms, without much economic compensation:
they exhibit the highest NPP loss. Coastal areas build wealth from imported resources
and technology, border regions generate limited wealth, in between regions have to
(over-) exploit their own mineral, fossil and biological resources to generate intermedi-
ate levels of wealth (Zhao et al. 2011), not least by exporting them to wealthier, more
industrialised provinces (Feng et al. 2013).

Air pollution

The urban air in China has long been known as the world’s worst, but in the latest WHO
list of most polluted cities there is no Chinese one amongst the top ten any more-Iran,

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 11

Figure 3. A Air pollution in Tayuan, Shanxi province (left, 2013), and B in Beijing (right, 2009).

Pakistan and India have conquered that sad crown. And this is not just because the situ-
ation got worse in those countries: the air quality has improved in many Chinese cities
(except in spike periods like the one in Beijing 2013) and is now at levels commonplace
in Japan in the 1970s and in Germany in the 1950s, and improving further.
Nonetheless the problem is far from being solved in China (see Figure 3) — in
2013 the air in most cities monitored reached concentrations of lung-penetrating fine
particular matter PM, , (diameter <2.5 sm) beyond the state standards released last
March by the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP). The Chinese air
quality index AQI for PM, , defining the upper threshold of what is good air quality,
is set according to the interim target 1 suggested by the World Health Organisation
WHO for highly polluted areas, at less than 75 microgram of particles per cubic meter
of air (<75 g/m?) for the 24-hour mean. This implies about 5% increase of short-term
mortality as compared to the target value deemed safe by the WHO according to its
2005 Air Quality Guideline of <10 g/m? for the annual mean, and <25 ug/m? for the
24-hour mean (WHO 2006). The WHO Air Quality Guideline recommendations for
PM, stand at <10 ug/m? for the annual mean and at <75 g/m? for the 24-hour mean
(WHO 2014). The EU has set a target value for the annual mean PM, , concentration
of <25 g/m? and an exposure limit of 20 ug/m’, both to turn into legal limits on Janu-
ary Ist, 2015, plus a target of 18 g/m’; the exposure values are calculated based on a
three year mean. For PM.,, legally binding limits stand at 40 g/m? for the annual and
50 ug/m? for the daily mean (European Commission 2014). In the USA, the Environ-
ment Protection Agency EPA has 2012 set a not legally binding annual target value
of PM, , <12 g/m? as the three year average, and a daily mean standard of <35 yg/
m? considered to be met if the 98th percentile of 24-hour PM, , concentrations in one
year, averaged over three years, is less than or equal to 35 <ug/m?* (EPA 2012).
Recent studies confirm that Chinese government policy has played an important
role in causing the pollution (e.g. by providing free winter heating via the provision of
coal for boilers in cities north of the Huai River). Burning coal without environmental
protection provisions has greatly increased total suspended particulates in the air, and
in particular pollutes the in-door atmosphere (Larson 2010). As a result, Chen et al.
(2013) estimate that due to such politically induced pollution the 500 million residents

12 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

of Northern China lose more than 2.5 billion life years of life expectancy. This is a strik-
ing example how a policy introduced for social reasons, but without taking its environ-
mental impacts into account, can turn out to be not only environmentally disastrous,
but also be backfiring socially.

An additional source of sod, in particular in the Northern provinces, is the habit to
burn left-over material from the harvest (mainly straw) in the fields, at about the same
time as domestic heating starts. While returning biomass ad minerals to the soils is in
principle recommendable, burning straw in the fields is not necessarily the best way of
doing it. The dark clouds over the fields signal not only air pollution, but also a loss of
organic carbon from the fields, and potentially damages to the habitats of organisms
important for pollination and biological pest control.

Biodiversity

China as one of the megadiverse countries of the world faces particular challenges. For
instance, the official Chinese Red List classifies almost 40% of the country’ mammals
as threatened. ‘The reasons are manifold, but the development pattern has played a
crucial role. As a result of growing urban agglomerations due to population growth and
urbanisation, lakes around cities have been degraded or lost, or replaced by artificial
ponds with high ornamental but low biological value (Figure 4).

Agricultural intensification contributed to the degradation or destruction of natu-
ral ecosystems, a development just like the one in Europe few decades earlier. Natural
landscape elements suffered, such as wetlands, meadows, hedge rows and other small
scale but biodiversity rich landscape structures (Figure 8). Widespread wetland and
peatland degradation caused not only biodiversity loss, but also significant amounts of
drying emissions of CO, and CH,. Agricultural modernisation replaced a rich diver-
sity of traditional cereal and vegetable varieties by a limited number of high yielding
but not necessary resilient, fertiliser and pesticide dependent varieties from China’s
excellent biotech laboratories. Less fertile areas—if not ploughed—suffer from grassland
desertification due to heavy grazing, in particular in Inner Mongolia and Northern
Gansu, with significant losses of grassland biodiversity.

Mountain areas suffered most from large-scale logging in Northeast China, Gansu,
Sichuan and Quinghai provinces from the 1970s to the 1990s; illegal logging is still
a problem. Reforestation programs, the world’s largest, affecting 10-15% of the agri-
cultural area, were sometimes successful, but on other occasions suffered from a lack
of economically effective incentives (Bennet 2008). On other occasions the economic
orientation of local development plans led to afforestation with fast growing species as
resource base for the pulp and paper industry instead of planting locally adapted spe-
cies and varieties, resulting in low resilience tree plantations rather than healthy forests.
This constitutes a problem in particular in the “Green Belts’ areas where forests have
been planted to stop the encroaching desert (Li et al. 2009).

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 13

Figure 4. Cities encroaching on surrounding wetlands (and a power plant in the midst): Harbin,

Heilongjiang province, 2010.

A rather recent stress factor for natural and cultural heritage sites and their often
unique biodiversity is the growth in domestic tourism; China is now the world’s big-
gest tourism market. Its spectacular but vulnerable landscapes, from wetlands at the
origin of the Yangtze and the Yellow River via nature reserves (see figure 9) to cultural
heritage sites like the rice terraces of Yunnan province, a UNESCO cultural world
heritage site, attract tourists but mostly lack a biodiversity-conserving management.

Water

Severe water stress is commonplace in China; the water table in Beijing has fallen by
100-—300m within two decades (World Bank 2009). The problem is fuelled by inefficient
use on top of an uncomfortable hydrogeological situation: four fifth of the water is in the
South, mainly in the Yangtze river basin, while half the population and two thirds of the
farmland are located in the much dryer North. Even the massive South-to-North Water
Diversion Project, transporting water from the Yangtze to the Yellow River basin, can at
best moderate but not solve this problem. Water shortage, increasing climatic variability
and land use pressures (plus climate change) makes the deserts grow (Li and Huntsinger
2011). Despite Green Belt plantations, farmland dries out and might lay idle due to a
lack of clean water supply, and crop yields are plateauing already (The Economist 2013b).

14 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

Figure 5. Water pollution in Gansu province 2012.

The widespread loss of wetlands contributed to the loss of 27,000 rivers in China
(excluding Taiwan, as in most statistics), nearly half of all those estimated to exist
in the 1990s, as detected in the water census published by Chinese authorities on
March 26", 2013. Climate, although likely an important factor (this three year study
coincided with a multi-year drought in central and southern China, where dramatic
drops in lake levels and a shrinking Yangtze River have been well-documented),
experts agree that the problem is largely man-made. Besides land use change, over-
exploiting ground water for industry and agriculture, and destruction forests causing
a rain shortage in the mountain areas for agricultural purposes have been named as
reasons (Yan 2013).

The situation is made worse by the massive water pollution, rendering a significant
share of the scarce water resources unsuitable for human use (Figure 5). For instance,
for a full third of its length, the water of the Yellow River was deemed too polluted
to be used in agriculture by the Yellow River Conservancy Commission. Within the
urban areas, safe drinking water provision is a serious problem: about half of all urban
water supplies are unfit even to wash in, let alone drink. Official statistics also showed
that 85% of the length of China’s six biggest river systems consisted of water deemed
undrinkable even after treatment. The proportion of polluted groundwater rose from
37% in 2000 to 60% in 2013 (The Economist 2014d).

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 15

Land

Land is a precondition for at least three kinds of ecosystem services: provisioning ser-
vices/sources supply vital material and energy resources such as fossil fuels, water, min-
erals, fibres and food, regulating services/sinks provide waste absorption, waste water
purification, water storage, buffering and regulating capacity, and socio-cultural ser-
vices/space provision, in particular for hosting human infrastructures such as settle-
ments, production sites, transport infrastructure, but also gardening, recreation sites
and places of worship (Erb et al. 2009). This “Triple S” of sources, sinks and space is
currently at risk: at least 36,000 hectares, about 10% of China’s farmland, was found to
be contaminated with excessive levels of heavy metals such as cadmium and chemicals
in 2006 according to a document authored by the Ministry of Environmental Protec-
tion of China (the study became public in 2013; current Figures are not available) (Lin
2013). Long-term industrial pollution has resulted in the accumulation of agricultural
chemicals, heavy metals, and non-biodegradable organic pollutants in the soils, with
most of the pollution occurring in more economically developed regions. In some cit-
ies in southern China, half of the farmland was found to be polluted with toxic heavy
metals such as cadmium, arsenic, and mercury, as well as petroleum-based compounds.
In the Yangtze River Delta, 10 percent of the sampled farmland was found to be no
longer suitable for growing crops, because of heavy metal pollution. As a result, 12 mil-
lion tons of crops harvested in China each year were contaminated, which translates
into 20,000 million yuan (2.300 million €) of economic losses every year (Lin 2013).

Furthermore, with economic growth land use for other purposes than agriculture
is increasing, as the possibilities for decoupling land use from economic development
are limited (Xue 2012a), national legislation was not implemented, land speculation
was rife, fuelled by misuse of local power positions and widely spread corruption, with
severe effects on local lifelihoods and food production capacities. One reason is the
growth of urban agglomerations (Figure 6), another the fact that cities are historically
often located on the most productive land (unlike protected areas which are located
on land of average productivity)(O’Neill and Abson 2009). While conservation (re-
forestation) has had positive effects on water retention and reduced erosion, it reduced
further the agricultural area. These factors combine with climate change, to the end
that Chinese food security is at risk (Wei et al. 2009). Land use change, in particular
sealing soil for settlements and soil pollution, also contributes to the loss of other eco-
system services beyond harvest, the provisioning service. Regulatory and socio-cultural
services are affected, but damages so far not quantified.

One economically rather marginal, but socially/culturally relevant and environ-
mentally highly important activity is herding in Western and Northern China, an area
with relatively low NPP and resource endowments, and a comparably low develop-
ment standard (Zhao et al. 2011). With about 400 million hectares China has the
second largest area of natural grassland in the world. Steppe degradation is a major
ecological and economic problem, in particular in the Inner Mongolia steppe region,
including the Inner Mongolia province and its neighbours from Gansu via Northern

16 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

Figure 6. Growing Megacities-Shanghai/Pudong 2010.

Figure 7. Intensive cattle grazing (Yaks) and first signs of erosion near Lang Mi Su, Sichuan province 2012.

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 17

Shanxi and Shaanxi to Heilongjiang (Figure 7), because it reduces grassland productiv-
ity and leads to desertification (Tong et al. 2004).

The change in herding practices, from a low-impact land use based on migratory
herding, well suited for marginal soils and harsh climates, to a settlement-based way
of living, keeping the animals in stables for several months and lorrying them to their
up-mountain grazing grounds has severe consequences for culture, lifestyle, social co-
hesion and not least the fragile environment. As the herds are no longer migrating
from summer to winter grazing places, the distance they cover on their hoofs (i.e. not
being transported to another grazing place by lorries) and thus the area of land they
graze has significantly declined, enhancing the use intensity on the area actually used
(for the effects of herd composition changes induced by China in the neighbouring
Mongolian steppe see Spangenberg et al. 2014). This is probably one of the main fac-
tors of ongoing destruction of top soil and subsequent erosion (Akiyama et al. 2012).
Maps underline that large-scale patterns of steppe degradation were related to land use
types, with climatic variations playing a minor role (Tong et al. 2004).

Take for instance Quianshan as an example. It was home to about 100,000 sheep in
2012, up from 40,000 in 1995, with the number still growing as market demand kept
increasing the prices. In the region already ~90% of the steppe is damaged by excessive
grazing, rural development and climate change (Cui 2012). The Chinese government
has sought a solution in enforcing strict boundaries for 60% of the land exempt from
grazing (including fencing). Economic compensation is paid for those prevented from
using it, and financial incentives have been offered to limit the size of herds (however,
they are not effective as the price of sheep continues rising with rising demand and
limited supply) (Li and Huntsinger 2011). Local complaints are mounting as fencing
is against all cultural traditions of the ethnic minority population affected. ‘The restric-
tion of grazing and migration areas has caused tensions; even a rise in crime is expected.
Already now livestock theft is commonplace and hard to control with free running
herds (Cui 2012). The traditional lifestyle with be finally terminated with new housing
and herds kept in stables with feed and fodder imported from outside the region as it
has already been practiced for instance in the Gansu province, creating deprived set-
tlements of disrupted communities and thus a potential source of future social unrest.

Climate change

If by 2100 global average temperatures rise by 2.1°C (range 1.4—3.1°C), with atmospher-
ic CO,,, concentrations around 450 ppm, the impact of this still optimistic scenario in-
cludes major threats, such as the begin of irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet,
subsequently (in the 22nd century) increasing global sea levels by about 7 m, affecting
China’s richest provinces, economic hubs and harbour cities, and hundreds of millions of
people, directly and indirectly (O’Hara 2009). As in China more people live at sea level
than in any other country, Chinese climate policy must do both, contribute to minimis-
ing global climate change and provide pre-emptive adaption strategies to these challenges.

18 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

A likely decrease of precipitation in already dry areas by 20-30% poses a risk for
Northern and Western China, the expected major drop of crop yields in tropical re-
gions would affect China’s South, and additional 15% to 40% of species could be
facing extinction all over the country.

Social sustainability

There has been growing concern over the sustainability of China’s economic growth.
The Chinese economy is strongly dependent on investment and exports (a quarter of
the CO, emissions is from export goods production), a pattern that has become increas-
ingly economically unsustainable. The dependence on investment and exports results
from insufficient household consumption, which, in turn, reflects rising income in-
equality and improving but still limited provision of social welfare—a problem of social
sustainability. As the economy has been fuelled by public investment into infrastructure
and productive capacity, investment into environmental protection had been neglected
for decades. In this sense, the economic growth happened at the expense of the environ-
ment, and the investment not made earlier already causes significant macroeconomic
cost, which will most probably increase rapidly over the next couple of decades.

After the early years, China’s development has been built on industrial develop-
ment in a model of unbalanced growth. ‘This has left the rural areas trailing urban areas
in development. Rural residents earn less than urban residents, have inferior physical
infrastructure, and suffer from poor basic amenities. These disparities have contributed
to the extensive rural-urban migration. This migration, by leaving residences unoccu-
pied, and depriving the country side of workforce and investment opportunities, has
exacerbated inefficiencies in rural land use. However, while reducing inefficiency is an
important policy objective in its own right, the current approach by the government
suffers from major deficiencies. There exists a link between the relative impoverish-
ment of Chinese peasants, due to declining agricultural prices, amplifying the flow of
rural-urban migration, its depressive effect on industrial wages as rural migrants do not
enjoy the same rights as registered citizens, the resulting increase in the profits’ share of
the total surplus, and rising top incomes. The enrichment of urban top income house-
holds drives the increase in the urban-rural gap and fuels the resulting tensions, while
labour’s loss of shares of national income ultimately accounts for the overall increase in
the Gini index and is a potential source of social unrest.

Institutional challenges

Balancing the relations of nature, society and leadership was at the core of the “har-
monious development” promoted by the Communist Party during the last decade.
This multiple balancing approach, the Chinese version of sustainable development,
has deep roots in the Chinese culture, with elements from Buddhism, Daoism and

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 19

Confucianism (Shi 2004, Xue et al. 2012). In reality, however, despite massive efforts
(Xu et al. 2006), harmony with nature has taken the back seat, falling behind what is
needed for China’s sustainable development. The underlying cause has to do with the
weakening of China's state capacity, a problem of institutional sustainability.

On the one hand, “good environmental law only gets you halfway there” as Pan
Yue, vice minister of environmental protection, told the state media, highlighting a
dear lesson of the last two decades on environment pollution politics. Public and civil
society pressure, media and whistle blowers uncovering violations of the law, authori-
ties both with a capacity and the willingness to act are required as well. In particular
the relative lack of enforcement personnel is an obstacle to be addressed if environment
politics is to become rigidly effective.

On the other hand, and more fundamentally, despite the basically centralist govern-
ance structure, strong state and party organisations in the (rich) provinces mean that the
national leadership has often been more in a moderating than in a regulating and enforc-
ing role. With economic growth slowing down (a natural process for ripening econo-
mies, in particular as the labour force has almost reached its peak) the pressure was high
to refrain from environmental measures perceived as hampering growth, supported and
stimulated to do so by European and US Companies, and the US and the EU Chambers
of Commerce. Both factors, local power and business pressure, limited the willingness
of provinces and cities to neatly implement central government’s orders or legal acts,
especially in booming provinces. The necessity to rule them in, in particular but not only
on environmental issues, is the background to the current leadership’s campaigns both
against corruption and for an ecological civilisation. Easier registration for NGOs (the
opposite of what is happening in neighbouring Russia), public interest litigation rights
to some NGOs, legal protection for whistle blowers (EU and USA could learn from
this) and repressive tolerance towards public actions focussed on environmental issues
(demonstrations, strikes, etc.) point to the same direction (The Economist 2014d). Their
success demonstrates that China’s state capacity remains relatively strong and its ongoing
strengthening will contribute to a more sustainable pattern of economic development.

China-—the World’s last best hope?

Institutional change: adjusting development priorities

According to Prime Minister Li Kequiang, China must “declare war on pollution”, and
end the “blind development” that has caused serious risks for human health, economic
development and nature's integrity. If indeed the struggle to eliminate such pollution
is pressing as hard and proceeding as successfully as the one to overcome poverty, as he
promised, both the Chinese population and the world would benefit. In particular the
new legislation announced on March 9", 2014, toughening the 1989 environmental
protection laws and due to enter in force in January 2015, represents not only ambi-
tion, but also a number of innovative measures to realise its intentions. It is paving the

20 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

way for stiffer, possibly unlimited penalties for polluting companies, allowing for fines
against polluters to increase daily until a violation is corrected (the one-time payment
usual so far, as in Europe, had failed to be effective). It also allows for the suspension
or shut down of repeated offenders (Saigon Times 2014), the detention of negligent
executives, and penalties for officials failing to enforce the law (Ihe Economist 2014d).
The public interest litigation function of some NGOs, and the whistle blower protec-
tion rules, together with the encouragement of more critical reporting in official me-
dia, plus a certain level of tolerance on internet blogging on environmental and food
security issues will help the case.

Measures announced are not only intended to secure private and public business
compliance, but offer incentives for increasing the energy efficiency and thus reduce
pollution from large, mostly state owned companies; the foreseen massive investment
in wind and solar energy has a similar effect. These measures, and the carbon tax to be
phased in gradually; are indeed necessary and urgent. The planned investment of some
200 billion € over the next five years to clean up China’s air is most impressive by any-
one’s standards. For all these actions, international collaboration and support is more
than justified (e.g. by making patented green technology easily and freely accessible).

An ecological civilisation requires not only new infrastructure and production facili-
ties as China is building them with a breath-taking speed on top of the existing ones,
but also requires phasing out of environmentally, socially and/or economically unsus-
tainable old installations: innovation is effective only if combined with exnovation. Plans
to shut down outdated production facilities in highly energy intensive sectors such as
cement, steel and glass making ahead of schedule are promising in this respect. How-
ever, as known from modern innovation research, such improvements tend to generate
incremental rather than deep structural change. Sustainable development requires three
kinds of changes: technological, social and institutional, with increasing importance of
social and institutional innovation (Rennings 2000). While social innovation includes the
prevailing consumption patterns, the core of institutional innovation is changing the se-
lection mechanisms according to which certain developments, inventions and strategies
become dominant, and others do not (Hausknost and Haas 2013). Therefore it is prob-
ably of even greater importance than the innovation/exnovation dualism that—after years
of discussion—the Communist Party decided to update its promotion criteria, making the
environmental performance an asset to be considered in the selection of cadres for higher
level positions, alongside the economic success. In particular this measure, combined with
the threat of penalties for non-enforcement, are a carrot-and-stick approach which may
be able to provide the effective tools to make the Prime Minister’s declaration operational.

Air quality and industrial emissions

Coal burning for electricity generation and in the energy intensive industries is the main
source of air pollution. China has made unprecedented progress in reducing the energy
intensity of its economy over the past three decades; in 2013 energy efficiency gains accel-

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 21

erated to a 3.7% decrease of energy consumption per unit of GDP, and a further increase
of 3.9% is announced for 2014. The measures taken include efficiency programs, energy
quota for state owned companies, and other laws and incentives. They have reduced the
primary energy conszmption per unit of GDP from 800 t of coal equivalent (tce) per 1
million US$ of output, down to 390 tce in 2009 (constant 2005 PPP). However, China’s
specific energy consumption is still above the global average of 300 tce (World Bank
2013), and the gap between China and the high-income countries is huge. For instance,
the primary energy intensity of Germany’s economy was 167 tce per million US$. This is
one of the reasons for the Germany's high international competitiveness—although com-
paratively small it was the no. 1 export nation until 2011 and overtaken by China only
in the wake of the Great Recession—which exemplifies the potential gains for China from
further improving its energy productivity, reducing the demand for coal. Thus the 40-
45% improvement 2005-2020 foreseen in the current planning is a welcome objective,
but it will not easy to achieve: the power plant efficiency improvements are facing limits
as the average thermal efficiency has increased from 31% in 2000 to 38%, the same level
as Germany (the USA are flat at 33%); the technical maximum is about 45%. ‘Thus ef-
ficiency increase in the energy sector, indispensable as it is, is insufficient if not combined
with efficient energy use, a substitution of renewable energy sources for coal, and emission
reductions from other sectors (including a more sustainable consumption). ‘This requires
a corresponding allocation of research funds—economic analysis has shown that there are
important conflicts between public and private welfare concerning the direction of energy
efficiency research. For enhancing public welfare, the concentration of research should be
in greater use efficiency, whereas for the private welfare of the extraction industry (state
owned or not) research in extraction innovation would be most helpful (Wils 2001).

An important sector that could benefit from energetic measures is road transport.
While gasoline cars are a rapidly growing consumer of fossil fuels, diesel cars and trucks
are not only a major source of PM, in the cities, they also place a heavy burden on
the country’s infrastructure. Incentives to replace old, polluting and often collapsing
heavy lorries with more sustainable means of transport are welcome. The sod emissions
of old trucks, together with sulphur dioxide SO, from the energy sector, are one main
origin of the unhealthy smog. Therefore the rapid reduction of SO, emissions is a great
achievement, with 3.5% reduction in 2013 and another 2% announced for 2014. A
Harvard university study characterised the SO, reduction programme of recent years
as “one of the most swiftly effective air-pollution policies ever implemented anywhere”
(The Economist 2014c).

However, as long as the efficiency growth lags behind the economic growth rate,
the energy demand will continue to increase, and with it coal consumption and emis-
sions unless the composition of sources is changed. This points to the urgent need to
continue the rapid expansion of renewable energies such as wind and solar which will
be needed to turn the trend on China’s CO, emissions, bringing them back to sustain-
able levels by the second half of the century. The development of solar energy will have
effects far beyond China itself; it could put the energy systems and politics of affluent
countries in Europe and America upside down (Schleicher-Tappeser 2012).

22 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

Energy generation and climate change

China has been surpassing the USA to become the biggest investor in renewable en-
ergy, spending 50 billion € in 2012, three time the investment in Germany (in all
three countries the need to modernise the grid is one of the key obstacles to more and
efficient use of wind and solar power). In the meantime, the total installed wind energy
capacity in China has surpassed the level reached in the EU. Although it contributes
only four to six percent to the national electricity consumption so far, the acceleration
foreseen in the five year plan (doubling the already high speed of expansion) can con-
tribute to the desired turn-around. As the investment in solar energy is similarly strik-
ing, hydropower has been systematically exploited (sometimes even over the top, given
the local social and environmental impacts) and other sources are being explored (e.g.
tidal, geothermic), China has become the world’s largest investor in renewable energies
research, innovation and installation. It may reach a peak of carbon emissions by the
end of the decade, followed by a decrease in absolute terms.

Other options under consideration look less promising: enhancing the nuclear sector
comes with high up-front investment, long-term capital fixation, uncertain but extremely
high follow-up cost (decommissioning cost in Germany has surpassed 4,000 million € for
one plant). The question of nuclear safety is a public concern, so a nuclear expansion strat-
egy carries with it the risk of provoking multiple local resistance, if not even-for the first
time-a nation-wide protest movement. Regarding energy provision and safety, nuclear
power does not offer the “biggest bang for the buck”; without heavy subsidies, it would
not be economical (compared to coal as much as to solar energy made in China). Also
the investment in Carbon Capture and Storage CCS seems misguided: judging from the
progress made over the last ten years and the projections for further development, CCS—if
it works at all—will come too late to prevent a climate collapse. At the same time, it stimu-
lates further coal use, potentially undermining China’s politically set goal to produce 20%
of its energy from renewable sources until 2020. It would absorb billions of Yuan which,
if invested in energy saving and renewable energies, would have stronger economic, social
and environmental effects: investments in renewables are more reliable, are expected to
pay-off in a shorter period of time and have the potential to create employment and in-
come opportunities in remote parts of Central and Western China. The energy consump-
tion of CCS (one additional power plant to fuel CCS for each three providing electricity)
and the technical uncertainty are additional economic arguments against CCS. For these
reasons the CCS euphoria has already declined in most European countries (for instance
Island and Norway cancelled their ambitious projects), but it still flies high in the USA—
not because technology and cost calculations would be different, but as result of a path-
dependent development, an attempt to recuperate the sunk cost already invested, and a
face saving measure for those who promised a solution to the climate problem from CCS:
a sink for money, but not for carbon. China, given its governance structure, should be in
a position to opt out of a strategy which was tested and proven to be no solution.

Both CCS and nuclear energy are burdened with economic and safety problems
of their long-term legacies: nuclear waste disposal sites, as much as large underground

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 23

high pressure CO, storages require continuous surveillance. The resulting cost of guard-
ing and maintaining the deposits for several hundreds to thousands of years are beyond
any calculation, but most probably exceed any economic gain from these technologies.

For other forms of geo-engineering the uncertainty is even higher, the success more
questionable, the cost more worrisome and the side effects more dangerous (Scheer
and Renn 2010, Gardiner 2011). For instance, technologies to cool the earth by re-
flecting sunlight may be able to decrease the temperature, but would result in chang-
ing weather patterns, including the possibility of a faltering or relocated monsoon, the
main water source for more than 2 billion people, including significant parts of China.
Even armed conflicts and pre-emptive strikes to avoid such developments have already
been discussed (Grunwald 2010).

Beyond co, and the energy sector, and CH F and N,O which are discussed in the
next section, some trace gases with extremely high radiative forcing are an element not
to be neglected. Insofar the phasing out of hydrofluorcarbons HFCs, a particularly
potent class of greenhouse gases, and the cause of stratospheric ozone depletion, is a
much welcome voluntary action China has undertaken.

Agriculture and land use policy

Agricultural problems in China have a qualitative and a quantitative aspect. Regarding
quality, a recent Greenpeace study found dangerous levels of heavy metals contamina-
tion on rice grown near mines and factories, underlining the need to rein in emissions
to air, land and water, and ending the sale of contaminated fertiliser (Ihe Economist
2014d). The environmental law will be of importance to address these problems.

On the quantitative side of the coin, the Chinese government correctly perceives
the need to redress the rural-urban gap, and sees land consolidation as an appropriate
approach not only to rationalise land use but also as an important component of rural
development. ‘This approach, together with a number of consolidation models, has
been endorsed by many scholars.

China’s new family farm policy is intended to initiate and accelerate the shift from
small farms of 0.5 to 5 ha to larger units, more efficiency and more mechanisation. How-
ever, US-like mega-farms are neither desirable for social and environmental reasons, nor
are they possible. Unlike the Great Plains, much of China’s agricultural area is sloped
requiring terrace construction to minimise erosion even in the loess plateau (see Figure
5). Furthermore, managing irrigation rice fields requires units of a maximum size of a few
hectares to control the water flow, and the paddy dykes necessary to that behalf, while
not excluding mechanisation, still limit its dimensions. Other downsides include that
oversized fields, managed not by transplanting but by direct seeding require more of the
expensive and energy intensive external inputs and show a declining input/output ratio
(Pan and Pan 2012). Farming incomes could be increased through reduced cost and
their reliability enhanced by reduced vulnerability to pest infestations by changing the
land management to methods such as ecological engineering (restrictions to insecticide

24 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

Figure 8. Agriculture in Xiyang, Shanxi province, China 2013.

use, less fertilisation reducing the attractiveness to pests, larger distances between plants
resulting in higher tillerage), substituting pesticide use for supporting biological control
mechanisms and organic for chemical fertiliser (Gurr et al. 2012). Such fields are less
prone to plant hopper infestations than conventionally managed fields, which pose a seri-
ous threat to food security in particular in Southern China—ecological engineering is en-
hancing food security and by reducing soil and water pollution also food safety (Gurr et
al. 2012). The system of rice intensification SRI technique has some commonalities with
ecological engineering (except for the biocontrol), and reduces water demand by keeping
soils wet but not necessarily flooded throughout the growing season (Noltze et al. 2013).
This could be a significant contribution to relaxing China’s water stress.

Reducing external inputs, together with quality standards and control, can also
contribute significantly to halting soil pollution in China, which is another reason for
concern regarding food security. Airborne soil pollution will be reduced in future by
programmes to clean and reduce emissions from energy generation and heavy indus-
tries initiated for other purposes.

Biodiversity

Effective biodiversity conservation requires both, protected areas as a retreat for sen-
sitive species, but also between them a landscape which is not a “biological desert”.
Ecological engineering in agriculture contributes to the latter by promoting a land-

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 25

Figure 9. Protected areas—International Ramsar wetland reserve near Siblungkeka, and a national reserve
in the mountain region, both Gansu province 2012.

scape management not pursuing a monoculture structure without any intermittent
structures providing ecological niches.

China has established a number of protected areas, some of them registered under
international conventions, such as the Ramsar Convention for the protection of eco-
logically valuable wetlands (see Figure 6). Although still more could be done, the size
and the management of protected areas have been improving. Afforestation is taking
place on a large scale (considered as the largest afforestation program in human his-
tory), but choice of species could be improved, with a focus on locally adapted ones.
This would support biodiversity conservation while at the same time contributing to

26 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

more resilient systems (which can be expected to pay out economically as well, but
only in the longer-term).

Finally, for a number of years sealing soil for settlement purposes has been re-
stricted or more or less effectively banned (Xue 201 2a, b), which is one reason for the
absence of urban sprawl and the mushrooming of high rise buildings in the growing
urban agglomerations (Figure 7). A similar space consumption restricting effect can be
expected from continuing politically prioritising rail freight transport over road trans-
port, although in both cases implementation could be improved.

Social sustainability

China today is a rapidly growing middle income country, home to a segment of less
than 10% of the population living in absolute poverty, a broad middle class and a small
super-rich elite, including 20% of the world’s dollar-billionaires. This income polarisa-
tion causes a number of problems:

e ‘The social discrepancies in a formerly rather egalitarian country cause dissatisfaction,
if not protest. Internationally it is well known that income disparities contribute to
conflict, violence and degradation of the social fabric (Wilkinson and Picket 2009).

¢ High wealth is a key driver of CO,-emissions; consequently, specific policies address-

ing the rich are needed (Hurth and Wells 2007).

Furthermore, if the Chinese development model were modified to reduce the export
and investment dependency, private consumption would have to play a larger role. This re-
quires eliminating the remaining pockets of poverty, strengthening the rural economy, and
increasing the median income. Doing so will hardly be possible without redistribution of
incomes and assets; growth alone will hardly be able to offer a solution (and has done the op-
posite in the past). To improve the average standard of living the consumption opportunities
for the so-far underprivileged will have to be enhanced, and with it, unfortunately, resource
consumption and emissions. This will hardly be possible without massive efforts towards
social justice and dramatically increased resource productivity, and sustainable consumption
(Lorek 2010, Lorek and Spangenberg 2014). In the past the Chinese leadership has reacted
sensitively to social unrest, trying to address the causes of dissatisfaction. However, income
and asset redistribution may be a different case as it inevitably produces winners and losers,
and the would-be losers tend to be associated with the ruling political and economic/finan-
cial elites. Getting towards a more equitable income distribution will require true leadership.

From villain to hero?

China has shown unprecedented efforts to clean up its environmental performance,
and plans to continue and even accelerate its progress. Nonetheless, regarding climate

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? — 27

change, its net ecological debt keeps growing as its emissions are still the world’s high-
est, and efforts to reduce CO, emissions will affect global warming only with a long
delay, due to the 120 years atmospheric residence time of carbon dioxide. To avoid in-
terference with the internal affairs of other countries, claim an international leadership
role, and to meet its international obligations (Rio Principle 2: “States have [...] the
responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause
damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national ju-
risdiction”) China has to start reducing its climate debt rather soon, and stop building
up its ecological debt soon after. Here three proposals are presented how this could be
achieved: the methane strategy, capping inputs and developing a new growth model.

The Methane strategy—an example of common but differentiated responsibilities

Rio-Principle 7: "[...] In view of the different contributions to global environmental
degradation, States have common but differentiated responsibilities."

So far rather neglected in climate protection policies, due to its physical charac-
teristics methane CH, could potentially play an important role in short-term effective
Chinese climate policies. For instance, if between 2006 and 2050 the global CH ;
emissions were reduced by about half the 2005 rate, due to its high radiative forcing
RF the result by 2050 would be equivalent (in terms of RF) to a complete phasing out
of carbon dioxide emissions over the same period (Smith et al. 2013). With its short
residence time, the maximum effect would appear within a couple of decades, while
in the longer run the extended residence time of CO, and N,O dominates the climate
effect of current emissions.

So if methane is such an important factor for global climate change, and was in
2005 responsible for 43% of the global climate debt, why is it not discussed more
intensively? This is an example of not taking the differentiated responsibility seriously
enough. For countries with a share of less than 25-30% CH, in their climate debt,
further reducing this limited contribution is not the most effective climate protection
strategy due to methane's limited atmospheric residence time, and this is the case
for most industrialised countries. For instance, the methane share in their national
climate debt is 23% for the USA, 21% for the UK and 16% for Germany, but 93%
for Bangladesh, 83% for Vietnam, 81% for Brazil, 66% for India and 53% for China
(Smith et al. 2013). Thus while early industrialised countries rightfully (and more or
less forcefully) focus on reducing CO, emissions, the developing countries and emerg-
ing economies would be well advised to focus on CH, emission reduction (without
neglecting a sustained, mid to long term effort to limit their CO, emissions), as the
most effective and efficient climate change mitigation strategy.

Globally CH, emissions originate in equal parts from biomass production, use
and disposal (with cattle breeding the dominant source), and from fossil energy pro-
duction, distribution and use. Thus investment to minimise emissions from fossil fuel
distribution systems are the first option for minimising CH , emissions; they reduce

28 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

losses and are therefore economically beneficial. Similar benefits arise when CH, emis-
sions associated with coal mining are captured and used as energy source. Reducing
methane emissions from biomass use requires a broader strategy, including improved
waste management (organic matter in waste disposal sites generates CH,), and by cap-
turing and using the methane, a relatively cheap technology commonplace in Europe.
Such measures can be implemented without deep structural changes of the economy,
that is, faster and at lower cost than reducing CO, emissions. Changing consumption
patterns, minimising beef in the diet (pork and chicken are less methane intensive) is
more challenging, but not impossible in a country like China (Feng et al. 2009). Most
importantly, specifically for South and East Asia, agricultural management methods
like ecological engineering and some elements of the system of rice intensification are
social innovations which together with technical innovations like the choice of appro-
priate rice varieties may help reducing CH, emissions. Integrating the low-methane
producing varieties developed in China into such innovate land and crop management
systems would be an important next step, with reduced N,O emissions resulting from
less fertiliser use a welcome side effect.

As this would result in a higher labour force demand in rural areas, financial incen-
tives for shifting to such methods may be a method of choice, combining rural income
generation and environmental protection. China has extensive experience with such
schemes and how they have to be implemented, not least from their use in the affor-
estation programs.

Controlling CH, emissions can be the low hanging fruits to pick, buying enough
time for the aggressive CO, reduction strategies to become effective regarding the
climate debt. It does not change the necessary carbon reduction targets, but makes it
easier to achieve them.

Unburnable fuels—capping consumption

In the past China has formulated its climate policy targets as reducing greenhouse gas
emissions per unit of GDP, resulting in ever increasing emissions in absolute terms. As
a result, despite massive efforts, China's emissions per capita have now surpassed those
of the European Union. What is urgently needed is a strategic plan how to bring back
greenhouse gas emissions from more than 7 t CO,,/cap (including CO,, CH, and N,O
but not LUCF) to the level the world’s atmosphere can absorb, about 2 t CO,_.,/cap. It
will require the combination of technical, social and institutional innovation on both
the supply and the demand side. “Peak demand” does not occur on its own and must be
brought about politically; only by getting “the Rich and the Dirty” under control can
the dynamic of ever increasing consumption and pollution be reverted (Spangenberg
2014). In the context of increasing wealth concentration and poverty gaps, this subject
is central to issues of social justice as well as environmental integrity (Hurth and Wells
2007). However, to avoid runaway climate change policies to cut demand are not sufh-
cient; the must be complemented by supply-side policies to stem the flow of fossil fuels.

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 29

Leaving 2/3 to 9/10 of all known fossil fuel reserves in the ground has been ex-
plained to be a necessity to limit the damages caused by climate change to a level hu-
man civilisation can probably handle; this is arguably the biggest challenge in shaping
how we will live in the anthropocene. China still lacks a strategy in this respect, includ-
ing a ranking of fuels to be used from by domestic extraction and from fuel imports.
Economically, the book value of proven reserves should be written down accordingly
(possible once priorities have been defined), by both public institutions and private
corporations, even if that implies loosing virtual value (the current overvaluation is
similar to the one of the other toxic assets causing the 2009 banking crisis). However,
the increasing cost of mobilising such reserves should make it easier to give up on
bringing them to the market.

When deciding which kinds of fossil fuels to use, plausibly the most CO, producing
fossil energy carriers should be phased out first, notably lignite (brown coal). This would
affect the lignite mining areas in Germany, Australia, the Czech Republic, and Inner
Mongolia in China, where some of the largest lignite development projects are under
way. Regarding reserves, Germany has the world’s largest ones (40.5 Gt), followed by
Australia (37.2 Gt), the USA (30.2 Gt), China (18.6 Gt) and Serbia (13.4 Gt)(WEC
2013). Taking into account not only the lower caloric content of lignite and the result-
ing high specific emissions, but also other negative side effects and the emissions, lignite
is the dirtiest fossil fuel. Add to this the high water consumption in open pit mining, the
heavy transport loads on rail and road with all the resulting damages, and the high sulphur
content which has caused acid rain particularly in Southern China, investment into lignite
is incompatible with climate and general environmental responsibility. The second fossil
fuel to be phased out would be hard coal (before oil and gas), affecting a wide variety of
producers and consumers (coal is mined in over 100 countries), and in particular China
which consumes more than half all coal produced on Earth (2011: China 50.7%, United
States 12.5%, India 9.9%, Russia and Germany 3.3% each) and produced almost half of
all coal on Earth (2011: China 49.5%, United States 14.1%, Australia 5.8%, India 5.6%,
the European Union 4.2%) (Olivier et al. 2012).

Once the decision has been taken which kinds of reserves to explore and exploit,
the choice must still be made where to do it, domestically as well as regarding imports.
Such a decision should be taken not exclusively based on cost considerations, but on an
assessment of social and environmental impacts associated with drilling and pumping
oil or gas, and for digging coal in each place. Oil and gas extraction, and coal mining,
even using the most modern techniques, will always be dirty business. There is no
ethical, environmental or social justification for mobilising reserves with above-average
environmental and social impacts, including deep sea oil, tar sands, or hydraulic frac-
turing for shale gas, destroying riverine delta ecosystems and other wetlands, densely
populated farmland, or biodiverse forests. These are places uniquely unsuited for fos-
sil fuel extraction, now and in the future. Halting the fuel frontier should begin in
such fragile ecosystems as saving the most vulnerable locations from extraction would
avoid huge ecological and social costs. For any mining or drilling operation outside
these fragile systems, the environmental impact, in particular the carbon emissions,

30 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

ecological degradation by specific land use practises and water consumption should
be minimised, biodiversity and ecosystems conserved and the social, economic and
environmental rights of local resident communities and minority groups safeguarded.
Today, some countries are already taking steps to limit their emissions out of a necessity
to increase energy independence as much as to reduce pollution.

A new growth model: Degrowth by design, not by disaster

Capping the carbon or total energy input (as foreseen by the Chinese government as a
later step after first capping the CO, output and charging for it) is necessary to com-
plement existing policies and enhance their effectiveness. It requires a growth model in
which the increase of resource efhiciency Y/R is permanently higher than the economic
growth rate Y: d(Y/R) > dY (R total national resource consumption, Y size of the na-
tional economy, Spangenberg et al. 2002, Spangenberg 2011). This in turn requires
accepting limitations to national affuence (measured in terms of resources consumed),
and for reasons of justice and social stability effort towards a more egalitarian distribu-
tion of income and assets.

While at first glance this this may sound like a development suppressing policy
proposal and big challenge to China, at a second look it is rather an opportunity
compared to a strategy of economic growth and the attempt of technical remediation.
Today, the cost of soil degradation and health impacts of air pollution amount to 9%
of the GDP per year, according to the World Bank. This Figure makes the reported
growth rates seem rather hollow; net growth seems to have been in the lower one digit
realm. Thus with lower gross growth rates to be expected, one way of securing eco-
nomic stability is reducing the environmental and health cost, reaching a comparable
gain in the standard of living (net growth) with much reduced GDP growth rates.
Reducing air and water pollution, conserving biodiversity, limiting land use change
and restoring fertile soil are immense tasks, but they have to be tackled with full force
in order to sustain the basis for the country’s further development.

Nonetheless an abrupt and massive reduction of energy and resource consumption
is no politically viable option. It probably would reverse economic growth into reces-
sion, and lead to a collapse of development, if not of the economy, due to a lack of
physical inputs. Such a Degrowth by Disaster is the more probable the later the change
course is initiated. The choice is between:

e demand side management through higher energy prices, behaviour change involving
energy conservation, and lower economic growth but a number of cost saving fringe
benefits such as avoidance of acid rain and reduced health care cost, a more healthy
and productive labour force and less environmental motives for public unrest, versus

e supply side management focussing on higher growth rates and technology transi-
tions—with probably limited gains for society as the transition investment absorbs
the surplus from the higher growth rate.

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 31

The higher level of uncertainty lies with the growth strategy as it relies on the de-
velopment and successful implementation of not-yet-existing technologies for climate
management, such as CCS and geo-engineering, solutions expected to be available on
a large scale in due time and without undesirable side effects.

Outlook

Humankind is at a turning point, and a point of no return: there is no way back, and
the prevailing development trajectory is a dead end street we drive down with ever
increasing speed. Policies to accelerate growth are policies to increase the speed with
which we are going to hit the wall. Having population growth, resource availability
and planetary boundaries in mind, it is high time for implementing a development
paradigm which allows for a high quality of life at about 1/10 of the current resource
consumption. This will require the most ambitious and far reaching innovation pro-
gram ever, including the “ex-novation” of obsolete, unsustainable technologies and in-
stallations. Not adding new and better technologies to the portfolio is what is needed,
but replacing outdated, resource intensive production processes and factories, together
with a change of consumer preferences towards “prosperity light”. The second ele-
ment besides reducing the pressures through resource efficiency, renewable energy and
sustainable consumption is deceleration of developments, social and technological, to
provide nature the time necessary for ecosystems and species to adapt to and co-evolve
with a changing environment.

Taking the differentiated responsibility approach seriously requires taking meth-
ane and LUCF into account when defining climate policy strategies. While this is a
challenge, it also provides additional opportunities for effective climate policies for
countries like China. One such option is a strong focus on CH, emission reduction,
which would have a comparably rapid effect on effective warming and thus reduce the
climate debt much faster than a reduction of CO, emissions can do, due to the neces-
sary structural change of the energy and wider economic system, and the atmospheric
residence time of carbon dioxide. It enhances the range of policy options available,
providing additional short term effective affordable options. For instance, Green belt/
green frontier and afforestation programs are an example of how LUCF emissions can
be reduced. They have been implemented by the Chinese government for a number
of years now; however, to provide success in the long run, they need to be improved
regarding the social and environmental standards applied (better compensation for
peasant participants, stakeholder participation, technical advice and education, selec-
tion of local species instead of wood production for the pulp and paper industry, ...)
(Li et al. 2009, Bennett 2008).

If, to cut carbon emissions, we need to limit economic growth severely in the rich
countries, then it is important to know that this does not mean sacrificing improvements

in the real quality of life-in the quality of life as measured by health, happiness, friendship,

32 Joachim H. Spangenberg / BioRisk 9: 1-37 (2014)

and community life, which really matters. However, rather than simply having fewer of
all the luxuries which substitute for and prevent us recognizing our more fundamental
needs, inequality has to be reduced simultaneously. We need to create more equal societies
able to meet our real social neEds Instead of policies to deal with global warming being
experienced simply as imposing limits on the possibilities of material satisfaction, they need
to be coupled with egalitarian policies which steer us to new and more fundamental ways
of improving the quality of our lives. The change is about a historic shift in the sources of

human satisfaction from economic growth to a more sociable society.
Wilkinson and Pickett 2010

Besides reducing the pressures by redirecting the drivers causing them, immediate
rescue measures are needed. They need to be based on a foresight based governance/
management of social and ecosystems which make use of all available potentials and
system characteristics to avoid system collapses by enhancing their adaptive capaci-
ties, including cultivating carbon sinks by ecosystem restoration. Strengthening the
capability of the central government not only to pass legislation (pollution laws and
thousands of decrees) but also to enforce their implementation, administratively and
legally, may be a necessary step; independent reporting about the local situation—in
Europe often a function of civil society organisations— would help the central go-
vernment to gain a better control of the implementation of its policy measures on the
ground and to further improve policy design. That the Communist party included the
environment into its four focal areas (Ecological Civilisation) may further help the
implementation of necessary measures, in particular as officials will be promoted with
a view on their environmental performance, and will be held accountable for their
overall execution of his position also long after having taken up other responsibilities.

Any country aspiring a leadership role in 21st century should be aware that the
majority of humankind, and in most severely G77 country inhabitants, will be nega-
tively affected by climate change. A country that is causing havoc on their lands and
people will lose the legitimacy of any such claim for leadership, regardless of its eco-
nomic or military strength. Thus for social, economic, environmental and geopolitical
reasons, a rapid transition towards a sustainable economy, making use of all available
means, is an urgent necessity, for Europe, the USA and not least for China.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the experiences he gathered and the discussions he had on
visits to China on behalf of the Helmholtz Centre for Environment Research UFZ
of the Division of International Nature Conservation, the German Federal Agency
for Nature Conservation in particular with Lennart Kttmper-Schlacke, the EU-China
Biodiversity Programme, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the European Com-
mission. Two reviewers deserve gratitude for their helpful comments on the initial
version of the paper.

China in the anthropocene: Culprit, victim or last best hope for a global ecological civilisation? 33

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