The US and China will restart stalled climate negotiations following the meeting of Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, bringing relief to the diplomats and climate experts gathered in Egypt at the UN COP27 summit on how to limit catastrophic global warming.
The two leaders agreed to “empower key senior officials to maintain communication and deepen constructive efforts” on a range of transnational issues, including climate change, global economic stability and food security, a White House readout of the meeting said.
The White House said the leaders “spoke candidly” about many issues at the meeting in Bali. While Biden raised objections about Chinese policies towards Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan, he made clear the US would work with China on critical global issues where they had a mutual interest.
At last year’s UN COP26 summit in Glasgow, Washington and Beijing made a rare joint declaration to co-operate on climate change but talks were suspended by China in protest at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August.
The rapprochement leaves five days at COP27 for US climate envoy John Kerry to engage in formal negotiations with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua.
The development was welcomed by the UN secretary-general in Egypt, where observers and country negotiators have reported that discussions on critical issues have become bogged down in political divides.
“There is no way in which we can address the climate challenge that we face without the co-operation of all G20 members and in particular without the co-operation of the two biggest economies, the United States and China,” António Guterres said. “And I am very happy that the countries had a summit today.”
In recent weeks, Kerry has indicated that he and Xie Zhenhua have had several informal discussions, including meeting casually at the Sharm el-Sheikh conference.
Kerry had repeatedly urged China’s leadership to allow formal negotiations to resume, stressing that discussions between the world’s two biggest polluters was crucial to tackling the “existential issue” of climate change that “involves every nation, including our friends in China.”
In a statement after the Bali meeting, China’s foreign ministry said the countries had a responsibility “to keep a constructive relationship” and that they had “mutual interest” in the need to tackle climate change.
“The US side is committed to keeping the channels of communication open between the two presidents and at all levels of government . . . and to strengthen necessary co-operation and play a key role in addressing climate change, food security and other important global challenges,” the Chinese foreign ministry said.
It added: “The two countries will jointly work for the success of the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
The US-China joint statement issued in Glasgow last year contained little by way of new commitments, other than China stating it would address methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas. But China did not go as far as to join an US-EU pact to cut methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030.
Nonetheless, climate change experts and negotiators in Sharm el-Sheikh welcomed the news. “This unequivocal signal from the two largest economies to work together to address the climate crisis is more than welcome, it’s essential,” said Manish Bapna, president and chief executive officer of NRDC, the environmental advocacy group, who called on the two countries to “act with speed and conviction to meet the challenge of the moment.”
Johan Rockström, professor in Earth System Science and director of the Potsdam Institute, said that the restart to US-China relations on climate was “more than symbolic”. The two countries were critical in the UN high level discussions on how to handle everything from decarbonisation plans to funding for poorer nations suffering the effects of climate change.
Ani Dasgupta, the president of the non-profit World Resources Institute research group, said the global community was “breathing a sigh of relief”. “There is simply no time left for geopolitical faultlines to tear the United States and China away from the climate negotiation table,” said Dasgupta.
The announcement came on the same day as EU leaders tried to get off the back foot at COP27 as bloc countries rush to replace fossil fuels no longer coming from Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.
Frans Timmermans, the commissioner for the EU’s Green Deal, hit back at suggestions the energy crisis meant the bloc was falling behind on its efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 55 per cent, compared with 1990 levels, saying “nothing could be further from the truth”.
Timmermans said that if energy problems meant that “in the short run, we use more coal than we had anticipated, it is because we are going to go much faster with our energy transition. At the end of the day, this does not lead to a bigger carbon footprint of the EU.”
At the same time, the G7 presidency, held by Germany, launched an initiative to provide funding to aid countries suffering extreme weather disasters due to climate change. The so-called Global Shield was developed with the V20 group of climate vulnerable countries, now numbering 58. Pakistan, Ghana and Bangladesh will be among the first recipients, according to the programme announced at the COP27 summit.
Additional reporting by Alice Hancock in Brussels
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