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UCI delegation participated in first annual NCF summit in Paris 25/05/2012 The Chinese delegation takes a group photo with Lady Barbara, Judge, Chairman of the UK Pension Protection Fund. The first annual New Cities Foundation (NCF) Summit was held in Paris on May 14-16. The summit brought together more than 500 urban policy makers and thought leaders to a three-day conference on global urbanization, with China as one of the core focuses. The mayor of Paris delivered a welcome speech. Other speakers including Gregor Robertson, Mayor of Vancouver; Ron Huldai, Mayor of Tel Aviv; Khalifa Sall, Mayor of Dakar; Greg Clark, UK Minister of State for Decentralisation and Cities; as well as the CEOs of General Motors, Ericsson, Cisco, and Suez gas. The Urban China Initiative (UCI), a partner of the NCF, assisted in organizing the summit by inviting and organizing 16 government delegates, enterprise leaders, and academics from China, as well as designing the plenary session "A Closer Look at Urban China: Towards the Urban Billion." Chinese delegates shared their insights as speakers at plenary and breakout sessions, including: "Securing Investments for the Urban Century: How do we Pay for the Urban Boom," which featured Li Dongming, General Manager of the Urban Fund at China Development Bank Capital, as a speaker. "Hard and Software City," which featured Jonathan Woetzel, Co-Chair of the Urban China Initiative, Senior Director at McKinsey & Co., as a speaker. "A Closer Look at Urban China: Towards the Urban Billion," which featured five speakers from the UCI delegation, including Yuan Yue, CEO and Chairman of Horizon Research Consultancy Group; James Lee, AIA LEED-AP, President of iContinuum Group; Jonathan Woetzel; Xiao Jincheng, Deputy Director of the Land Economy and Regional Research Bureau at the National Development and Reform Commission; and Xie Chengxiang, Deputy Mayor of Huangshi in Hubei Province. "Modern Urban

Data gaps hobbling trial carbon markets Xu Nan Liu Shuang August 09, 2012 Seven Chinese regions are due to launch emissions-trading schemes next year. They will struggle to do so, write Liu Shuang and Xu Nan. Late last October, China's top economic planning body - the National Development and Reform Commission - instructed the cities of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing and Shenzhen, plus Hubei and Guangdong provinces, to get ready to run carbon-trading trials. These are not China's first experiments with emissions trading. In fact, the country has of late seen a proliferation of exchanges: according to Chinese newspaper 21st Century Business Herald, by the time of last year's announcement, many provinces and cities were already setting up their own carbon exchanges, or "energy and environment exchanges" - which in almost all cases include trading of emissions rights. But to date, the platforms up and running are either voluntary or tied into the UN clean development mechanism. Some places, including Chengdu, Ningxia and Xinjiang, are either considering similar exchanges, or planning to host branches of the Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange, though these tend to mean nothing more than one employee in a single office. The seven Beijing-backed, mandatory trials kick-started last October represent a new level of ambition, however. Ten months on, how are they progressing? The short answer is: slowly. [...]

Zhang Chun Wang Haotong August 03, 2012 China's low-carbon city programmes are doing well on public awareness, but an NGO survey finds little evidence of greener habits. Only a small proportion of people in China's low-carbon pilot cities are living "low-carbon lives" in spite of widespread knowledge of the green agenda, a year-long survey of household energy consumption carried out by Beijing-based NGO Green Beagle suggests. The study of habits in eight Chinese cities identified as green leaders by China's top economic planning body, the National Development and Reform Commission, involved 3,200 questionnaires and interviews with three to five households in different income brackets in each region. The NGO wanted to find out if inhabitants of these places had heard about "low-carbon" lifestyles and whether they were making efforts to reduce their own environmental footprint through their daily choices. Under the "low-carbon" pilot scheme, which launched in 2010, the eight cities - Tianjin, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Xiamen, Hangzhou, Nanchang, Guiyang and Baoding - are trying to find ways of reducing carbon emissions while continuing to grow economically (Beijing and Shanghai were added to the list in 2011, but are treated as a separate category). Five provinces are charged with the same task: Guangdong, Liaoning, Hubei, Shanxi and Yunnan. If they perform well, they will be treated as an example for the rest of the country.[...]

English.news.cn 2012-07-01 13:48:39 YICHANG, July 1 (Xinhua) -- The Hanyi Railway, a section of a major high-speed rail corridor between the eastern metropolis of Shanghai and southwest China's city of Chengdu, opened on Sunday. The 293-km Hanyi Railway links Wuhan and Yichang, two large cities in central China's Hubei province. The railway will reduce travel time between the cities to one hour and 39 minutes, said Yang Tao, an official with the Wuhan railway bureau. The Hanyi Railway is part of the Shanghai-Wuhan-Chengdu Railway, or Huhanrong Railway, a major east-west high-speed rail corridor outlined in China's national high-speed railway development plan. The 2,078-km railway will travel though four provinces and two municipalities, connecting the cities of Shanghai, Nanjing, Hefei, Wuhan, Chongqing and Chengdu. Most sections of the Huhanrong Railway are in operation, with construction on the last section slated to be completed in 2013 [...]

Thématique n° 2 [ScienceDirect, via Biblio-SHS] Auteur : Lynn Price, Nan Zhou, David Fridleya, Stephanie Ohshitaa, Hongyou Lua,Nina Zhenga, Cecilia Fino-Chen Paru dans : Habitat International, Available online 28 January 2012 Abstract In 2009, China committed to reducing its carbon dioxide intensity (CO2/unit of gross domestic product, GDP) by 40-45% by 2020 from a s2005 baseline and in March 2011, China's 12th Five-Year Plan established a carbon intensity reduction goal of 17% between 2011 and 2015. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) of China then established a Low Carbon City policy and announced the selection of 5 provinces and 8 cities to pilot the low carbon development work. How to determine if a city or province is "low carbon" has not been defined by the Chinese government. Macro-level indicators of low carbon development, such as energy use or CO2 emissions per unit of GDP or per capita may be too aggregated to be meaningful measurements of whether a city or province is truly "low carbon". Instead, indicators based on energy end-use sectors (industry, residential, commercial, transport, electric power) offer a better approach for defining "low carbon" and for taking action to reduce energy-related carbon emissions. This report presents and tests a methodology for the development of a low carbon indicator system at the provincial and city level, providing initial results for an end-use low carbon indicator system, based on data available at the provincial and municipal levels. The report begins with a discussion of macro-level indicators that are typically used for inter-city, regional, or inter-country comparisons. It then turns to a discussion of the methodology used to develop a more robust low carbon indicator for China. The report presents the results of this indicator with examples for 6 selected provinces and cities in China (Beijing, Shanghai, Shanxi, Shandong, Guangdong, and Hubei). The repor