China Confronts Climate Change : A bottom-up perspective

China Confronts Climate Change shows that bottom-up initiatives offer a key current prospect for engaging rising China in robust and urgently required GHG-emissions-mitigation actions. This book offers the first fully comprehensive account of China’s response to climate change, based on a sound engagement with the global climate governance literature and contemporary debates as well as significant expertise about the Chinese context beyond the climate change arena. For those interested in China’s climate politics and urban and local responses to climate change, this book offers a unique set of perspectives and empirical material and is an invaluable resource for this important area of research.

China is an integral actor in any movement that will stabilize the global climate at conditions suited to sustainable development for its own population and for people living around the world. Assessments of China’s climatic-system consequences, impact, and responsibilities need to take into account the strengths, weaknesses, and potential of subnational governments, non-governmental organizations, transnational non-state connections, and the urban populace in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. A multitude of recent local initiatives that have engaged subnational China in actions that mitigate emissions can be enhanced by powerful framings that appeal to citizen concerns about air pollution and health conditions.

China Confronts Climate Change offers the first fully comprehensive account of China’s response to climate change, based on engagement with the global climate governance literature and current debates over responsibility along with specific insights into the Chinese context. Responsible implementation of any overarching climate agreement depends on expanding China’s subnational contributions. To remain fully informed about GHG-emissions mitigation, China watchers and climate-change monitors need to pay close attention to bottom-up developments.

The book provides a valuable contemporary resource for students, scholars, and policy leaders at all levels of governance who are concerned with climate change, environmental politics, and sustainable urban development.