China’s High Speed Rail System to Pick Up Steam: Forecast
CHINA – About 5,209 km of new high-speed railways will be put into operation in 2013, 2,738 km more than last year, global financial services provider UBS AG forecasted.
In 2012, about 250 standard sets of high-speed trains were delivered in China, and UBS projected the Ministry of Railways will place new orders for 400 more trains this year upon completion of the high-speed railway network.
According to UBS estimates, 60 per cent of the trains will operate on 200 km per hour speed lines, and the rest will run at 300 km per hour.
“The Ministry of Railways has not signed large orders since it placed a gigantic order of nearly 100 billion yuan (S$19 billion) in 2009, and the major high-speed train orders should be used up in March,” said Richard Wei, head of UBS Asia transport research.
Wei estimated that about 20,463 km of high-speed railways will be in service by 2015, compared with 9,337 km at the end of 2012. To cope with the gigantic investment in railway network expansion, the Ministry of Railways must augment its financing avenues or it will face a severe capital shortage, analysts said.
The ministry is already burdened with more than 2 trillion yuan in debt, and the construction nationwide of high-speed railways will put new pressure on the ministry over the next few years, Wang Mengshu, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, was quoted on Monday by the Economic Information Daily as saying.
Wang suggested the central government allocate more money for railway building as the railway plan is part of the State strategy. Local governments should also help finance railway projects because the new lines will boost economic development and create more jobs, Wang said.
“I think the three sides should jointly undertake the investment of railway construction. The ideal investment ratio is that the central government take up 40 per cent of total investment, the Ministry of Railways take another 50 per cent share, and the local government to pay 10 per cent,” Wang added.
A draft plan showed that 630 billion yuan will be spent on China’s railway construction in 2013.
– China Daily/Asia News Network
Report: China’s Lead in World Car Production to Widen
China will remain the primary driver of global vehicle production growth over the next four years, but the U.S. will remain the No. 2 vehicle producer in the world as North America continues to play a unique role in the automotive industry, according to WardsAuto and AutomotiveCompass.
The report comes from the newly released joint Global Light Vehicle and Powertrain Forecast service from WardsAuto and AutomotiveCompass. The new forecast also calls for auto makers to consolidate the number of platforms underpinning their vehicles while increasing the percentage of cars and trucks that rely on smaller engines.
The WardsAuto /AutomotiveCompass forecast, which is updated monthly for clients, projects growth in all global regions through 2018, with total vehicle output increasing 23 percent over the next six years. The report highlights the China-led Asia-Pacific region’s increasing dominance, especially through 2016, when production in China alone will climb to 26 million units; a 7.5 million unit increase from 2012.
By comparison, production in the U.S., the No. 2 vehicle producer, is projected to increase by 1.3 million by 2016, while production in the third-highest producing country, Japan, is forecast to decline by 875,000 units over the next four years, as capacity continues to shift to other locations.
– Automotive Fleet
China Dominates Investment in Protection of Water Supply
The annual global investment in forests, wetlands and other ecosystems that help keep human water supplies clean jumped by a third over four years to more than $8 billion, with China accounting for about 90 percent of that, according to a report released on Wednesday.
China accounted for more than $7.46 billion of spending in 2011 on natural water protection, known as watershed payments, according to Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental advocacy group. U.S. investment that year was $360.5 million.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates world investment in water infrastructure will reach $1 trillion by 2025. Current spending is around $80 billion, 10 times the total natural infrastructure investment for 2011. China is the world leader in offering compensation forecological restoration and protection, the report said. One Chinese program provided health insurance benefits to 108,000 people upstream from the coastal city of Zhuhai in exchange for adopting land use practices meant to improve drinking water for the region.
– Reuters
WB: Japan’s Economy Hurt by Row With China
Japan’s economy contracted in the second half of 2012 and is on track for lackluster growth of 0.8 percent this year, hurt in part by its bitter territorial row with China, the World Bank said in a report on Tuesday.
Relations between China and Japan, the world’s biggest economies after the United States, have deteriorated sharply since September, when the Japanese government purchased islands in the East China Sea that China claims.
The value of Japanese exports to China fell by 17 percent between June and November of last year, contributing to a 3.5 percent annualized drop in Japan’s growth in the third quarter.
The World Bank said the end of government tax incentives to purchase fuel-efficient automobiles also hurt the economy, as well as the fading boost to growth from reconstruction spending in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster.
“In Japan, the economy appears to be contracting — in part because of political tension with China over the sovereignty of islands in the region,” the World Bank said in its twice-yearly Global Economic Prospects report.
Revised GDP figures released by Japan in December showed the Japanese economy contracted in both the second and third quarters, and analysts expect it shrank further in the final three months of the year, as does the World Bank.
– Reuters
China Could Lead in Carbon Trading
Largely unnoticed in the West, Chinese carbon trading is getting up and running. In just two years, officials have designed and started to implement seven trading trials that cover around one-third of China’s gross domestic product and one-fifth of its energy use. If successful, the schemes will show that emissions trading could be a powerful way for China to control its greenhouse-gas emissions.
China plans to open six further regional emissions-trading schemes this year, in the province of Hubei and in the municipalities of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing and Shenzhen. It plans to expand and link them until they form a nationwide scheme by the end of the decade; that would then link to international markets.
China is not alone. Australia and South Korea are scheduled to open their own carbon markets in 2015, and California launched its first carbon-allowances auction in November 2012.
China may not seem a natural home for carbon trading. With heavy government intervention, significant state ownership of enterprises and a culture of distrust in business, the country remains far from a true market economy. Until now, China’s experience of carbon trading has been almost exclusively under the Clean Development Mechanism, the international carbon-trading scheme set up under the Kyoto Protocol, to which it is the leading supplier of credits. Only a few symbolic transactions of carbon offsets have been made since the Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai voluntary emissions-trading exchanges opened in 2008.
However, China’s political system could let a carbon market grow faster than anywhere else. Once Chinese leaders have accepted a concept, opposition is steamrollered and changes are implemented much more quickly and broadly than is possible in societies in which policy-making is based on a balance of the interests from different stakeholders. Stable policies are crucial to the success of emissions trading, which — unlike most markets — grows from the top down.
“China’s political system could let a carbon market grow faster than anywhere else.”
Challenges lie ahead for emissions trading in China. The country needs to develop and enforce proper legislation and regulations to measure, report and verify carbon emissions from industrial sites. It needs to build an effective and accountable framework to oversee the reporting and trading of carbon credits. Most urgently, China needs to look at how it collects and analyses data on carbon emissions.
The credibility of China’s statistics on energy use and carbon emissions has long been questioned, partly because numbers calculated using top-down and bottom-up statistics do not match. The discrepancies can be very large. For example, last year, scientists compared Chinese CO2 emissions as calculated using top-down energy data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China with those calculated using bottom-up data from the 30 provincial statistics bureaus. For 2010, the bottom-up figure was larger by an amount equivalent to the total annual CO2 emissions of Japan, about 5% of the global total (D. Guan et al. Nature Clim. Change 2, 672–675; 2012). Without accurate numbers, the first deal of the Guangdong trading scheme was based on expected future carbon emissions, rather than historical data.
China should set up a reliable system for gathering carbon data as soon as possible, and build a comprehensive database of carbon emissions. Standard international methods for carbon trading to reduce emissions demonstrate how to set up a baseline, show that any emissions change is genuine and calculate the reductions.
Reliable data-gathering will require effort from the scientific community at home and abroad, to improve statistical methodology. It will also need political action. The organizations that collate and publish carbon statistics should be made independent of possible government interference. And China needs specific laws to ensure honest reporting and transparency, and to punish those who make fraudulent or misleading claims about their carbon emissions.
If China can build a workable and credible emissions-trading scheme, it will benefit not just one country, but the entire world.
Nature Volume:493, Pages:273 Date published:()