Background of the project

The project is addressing that China is changing rapidly, this with all impacts to the environment. It is hoped that the project will help to engage China further in the international community, in particular to contribute actively to the global environmental issue.

The project is based on a stakeholder analysis, which explored the following needs and constraints:

• The rapid industrial growth in China will lead to an increase of energy use and related CO₂ emissions, what requires effective measures.
• China is directly concerned by the global warming and has to take measures to mitigate CO₂ emissions.
• Although China has ratified the Kyoto Protocol in August 2002, the country is a minor market player (fewer projects than in Costa Rica) so far.
• On the other hand China is posed to become a major market player and actor and partner for Europe in GHG mitigation due to the huge Chinese potential in this respect.
• But these huge potentials are restricted to materialise in concrete actions, because of the low expertise to manage and to reduce emissions in the industry and no sufficient capacity building for companies in this respect.
• Compared to other countries China is behind the learning curve and more adequate training tools respecting the specific conditions of a planning economy approaching the market economy are required.

The situation can be summarized as follows: China has huge potentials, but low expertise to reduce CO2 emissions in the industry:

• Industry will keep its position as the biggest energy consumption sector because of the first stage of industrialized economic development pattern in China with its emphasis on heavy industry. Energy intensive production will continually take large part of total industry output.
• Although energy efficiency in industry will increase faster than in other sectors, the main constraint to more effective CO2 emissions reduction in China's industry is the lack of information and skills how to do on company level. The great potential of the Chinese market in this respect can very often not materialise in real turnovers because of insufficient awareness about the mitigation measures and how to identify and realize them.
• Holistic thinking, as required to meet such complex matters as GHG mitigation measures, is not very common in China up to now. Single approaches oriented on the close profession of experts are the usual way of thinking.
• Chinese officials in charge of professional human resources development have started to rethink the system and they are sometimes sorry meanwhile, that most trainings in China, which have been supported generously also by Europe, where more or less technical trainings dealing with the single technology levels.
• But the more recent intentions also of the European Commission to direct co-financed technical assistance for China towards more superior political and managerial topics is confronted with serious barriers, as Chinese experts, although well educated, are many times not able to follow the sophisticated explanations of Europeans, because basic understanding (for example how the market functions) is missing.

The actual project proposal has these considerations in mind and tries to realize a new generation of capacity building covering both the managerial as well as the technical aspects of the matter. As a result, the identification, adoption and promotion of suitable measures to reduce CO2 emissions in China are an important topic to support China, but require new didactics (see more to this point under 'Methodology').