CGTN's Wu Lei spoke with Professor Bo Yan from Fudan University for more insight on international cooperation on climate change.
BO YAN "Climate change is an issue of long lasting importance in the bilateral agendas between Europe and China, and also there's extensive climate cooperation between china and France, China and Germany. In terms of challenges, I think since European countries and China have stayed in a different stage of development, I guess they need to strengthen dialogue and cooperation and try to understand their climate policy better."
WU LEI "How significant is the timing of this summit as it comes ahead of a global climate summit set to be held by the United States next week?"
BO YAN "You know, a global leader summit is a multilateral one, it will invite different leaders from different countries. China and EU have long term and stable cooperation on climate change. There's already climate partnership between them, in some instances this is a mini summit. So they might go deeper into some future climate cooperation. This mini-summit will send some positive political signal to multilateral global summit."
WU LEI "How can we assess the trilateral relationship between China, Europe and America in the global fight against climate change?"
BO YAN "China, EU and the United States are all key players in global climate governance in terms of their huge emissions as well as their huge influence. They have formed the kind of trilateral relations in the past three decades. There are also divergences among them in terms of how to fairly distribute the responsibility or duties on addressing climate change, especially in terms of rules making in UN climate negotiations. So it's both co-operative and competitive, overall I think this kind of trilateral relationship will have a huge influence on the global climate governance."
WU LEI "The US is keen to cooperate with China in addressing the climate change issue. So what do you think can be achieved during John Kerry's visit?"
BO YAN "Through very candid dialogue and in-depth exchange we use between the two sides, I hope they could achieve deep cooperation in UN climate negotiations, especially in the upcoming COP 26 conference parties and the UNFCC, I think it's very problematic cooperation between China and the United states in terms of clean energy or low carbon cities could also be promoted. So here comes the question , how the US could ensure their consistency of its ambitious climate policy."
