China is willing to allow poorer developing nations take priority in receiving rich nations' funding to combat climate change, the nation's assistant minister of finance said here Wednesday.
China is willing to allow poorer developing nations take priority in receiving rich nations' funding to combat climate change, the nation's assistant minister of finance said here Wednesday.

However, China will stick to its stance of demanding rich nations provide 0.5-1% of their annual gross domestic product as funding to help developing nations for the period to 2020 and beyond, Zhu Guangyao told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview. He didn't provide information on whether Beijing would insist on some of the funding going to China .

China's central government has allocated an annual environmental protection and energy conservation budget of CNY100 billion over the past two years, and will likely invest more in the coming years to achieve its announced target of cutting carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 40%-45% from 2005 levels by 2020, Zhu said.

He also hopes that government spending would be able to stimulate more investment from the private sector which could help China meet its carbon intensity goal.

China 's voluntary target will not be up for international monitoring, Zhu added, although China is in the process of building a reliable system to report, monitor and verify carbon emissions.

Zhu reiterated China 's strong opposition to efforts by some nations to impose carbon tariffs.

"Some nations raised the carbon tariff issue in the ( Copenhagen ) negotiations, and we are strongly against it," he said. Such tariffs are a form of trade protectionism which would ultimately hurt the nations that impose them, he said.

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