The Financial Times is reporting with excitement that senior Chinese climate change officials have set a date for emissions cuts: 2050.

Let’s hope that’s not what was meant in statements by Su Wei, director general of the National Development and Reform Commission’s climate change division, because experts are hoping for much sooner cuts than that.

FT quotes Su as saying: “China’s emissions will not continue to rise beyond 2050.”

Judging from a report released this week, 2050 China Energy and CO2 Emissions Report, Su’s comments are a throw-away. The report, co-authored by China’s top climate think tanks, the Energy Research Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission and the State Council’s Development Research Centre, gives 3 scenarios for emissions. Even in the “business as usual” scenario, in which economic gain continues to dominate, China’s carbon emissions peak in 2040.(Reuters)

So China’s emission will likely fall before 2050. The question is when.

In international climate change debates, China continues to balk at suggestions that it put a time table on its emissions peak date and play hardball with the rich western countries. (Business Green)

But the Energy Research Institute report indicates that a more amenable position is emerging. They highlight an “enhanced low carbon” scenario" which shows emissions leveling off after 2020 and dropping after 2030. By 2050, they hit 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon – China’s 2005 emission levels. This would be “difficult but doable,” according to Jiang Kejun of the Environment Research Institute.

The report notes impact scenarios and discusses what emissions control measures would be needed to hit the enhanced low carbon targets. These targets still wouldn’t be enough for China to hit the “2 degrees by 2050” goal that experts have advanced as a tolerable level of warming – that might require China to peak in 2015 or 2020. But it proves that, however much it refuses to acknowledge emissions targets at international meetings, at home, China is thinking hard about these matters.

In December this year, parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will descend on Copenhagen to wrangle over the details of a new global climate deal — a potential successor to the Kyoto Protocol. See Nature’s Road to Copenhagen special for more coverage.

Published on behalf of David Cyranoski