Author: Jonathan Symons, Hong Kong Institute of Education

Climate change is a key threat to Asia’s future economic and political stability and Asian states are responsible for an increasing percentage of global emissions. China, as the world’s largest emitter, has been widely condemned for its intransigence at the 2009 Copenhagen negotiations. However, its defenders counter that China’s commitment to reduce emission intensity by at least 40 per cent between 2005 and 2020 is a comparatively ambitious promise.

This debate misses the point: that mitigation efforts premised on the negotiation of national emissions targets are doomed to fail. State interests and conceptions of fairness are too divergent for the existing negotiation framework to avert dangerous climate change. Read more…