China’s carbon emissions may have started to fall in 2025

2025 could be the year when China's greenhouse gas emissions begin a long-term downward trend, but for now that target still hangs in the balance.

China is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide and has set a goal of seeing its emissions begin to fall by 2030, a turning point seen as critical if the world is to avert climate catastrophe in the coming decades.

After the first three quarters of 2025, it is too close to say whether the full year will see a slight increase or a slight decrease. according to analysis To Lauri Myllyvirta at the Energy and Clean Air Research Center in Finland for Carbon Brief.

China's total emissions have remained unchanged or decreased slightly since March 2024. Rapid growth in solar and wind power is a major force driving down emissions, but demand for fossil fuels in other sectors has increased, Myllyvirta says.

“Emissions from the power, cement and steel sectors have fallen, but the chemicals industry has seen another significant increase in coal and oil consumption,” he says.

From January to August, electricity demand increased by 320 terawatt-hours, up 4.9 percent from the same period last year. Offsetting this, solar generation grew by 250 TWh, wind by 105 TWh and nuclear by 30 TWh, for a total increase of 385 TWh from three non-fossil sources.

According to Myllywirt, the pace of solar energy development in China is astonishing. “In the first half of 2025, solar capacity growth was equivalent to installing 100 solar panels per second,” he says. “Solar capacity added was 240 gigawatts in the first nine months of the year, a 50 percent increase over last year. This capacity addition in just nine months exceeds the total installed capacity in the United States.”

Trade tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump have so far not had a noticeable impact on China's emissions, Myllyvirta says, as the positive and negative forces of the trade war largely cancel each other out.

If China's emissions do start to fall, we can expect the global trend to move in the same direction, he says. Li Shuo at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington. “However, I would caution against declaring a peak prematurely as we need data over the next few years to confirm the trend,” he says.

“The future of the Paris Agreement temperature targets depends on how quickly China and developed countries accelerate emissions reductions, and how developing countries manage to curb emissions while promoting economic growth,” Li says.

David Fishman Lantau Group, a Hong Kong-based consultancy, says emissions look set to fall this year, but it also cautions against early optimism. “Anything can happen in the last few months of 2025,” he says.

“Energy growth was driven 100 percent and then from low-carbon sources, halting and even slightly reversing emissions growth in the power sector.”

Even if China peaks ahead of its 2030 target, it is unlikely that emissions will decline rapidly in the next five years, Fishman says, because Chinese consumers have not yet reached the per capita energy consumption levels of high-income countries. “I think we'll probably see flat emissions in China until 2030 and no real decline until after 2030.”