Rocky Mountain Institute Releases Report Introducing New Concept of Whole-System Zero-Emissions Demonstration

A Vision on Future Green Urbanization toward Carbon Neutrality

BEIJING, Nov. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) released a new report titled Whole-System Zero-Emissions Demonstration: China's Vision on Future Green Urbanization, introducing a brand new concept—Whole-System Zero-Emissions Demonstration (WS-ZED). WS-ZED will help cities in China implement the country's latest announcement on the pledge of "2030 Carbon Peaking" and "2060 Carbon Neutrality." The report provides a theoretical framework and quantitative indicator system to decouple green economic growth from carbon emissions, waste and pollution in cities.

As cities in China go through economic transformation, they simultaneously face the challenges of carbon emissions, waste management and pollution control. Fortunately, China has accumulated rich experiences of managing urban growth over the past 40 years across complex natural geography and diverse social conditions.

Meanwhile, globally the urban population is predicted to increase by 2.5 billion by 2050, and the main driver for the new round of urbanization is the global division of labor and industrial transfer. As a result, carbon emissions of emerging economies are often export-driven while waste and pollution remain a domestic issue. All three issues are seriously affecting the daily life of everyday people.

By tackling those three challenges all together for the first time, the WS-ZED concept goes one step further than net-zero carbon and proposes a broader concept to reveal the added value of synergy among net-zero carbon, net-zero waste, and net-zero pollution. This new concept aims to resolve these growth challenges by adopting a holistic approach to put in place urban management policies to combat both climate change and environmental degradation.

This new concept has gained strong buy-in from the market and policymakers in China. RMI is contributing to the Beijing Administrative Zone (Tongzhou District) 14th Five-year Plan by introducing the WS-ZED concept. Beijing Future Science City of Changping District, home to research divisions of multiple state-owned enterprises in the energy sector, has cited WS-ZED in its integrated energy planning document to support its strategic goal of establishing global Energy Valley and attracting pioneer energy innovators from the whole world. Areas like Tongzhou and Changping are typical examples of urban development zones demonstrating bottom-up efforts toward carbon neutrality in line with and supportive of China's national pledge.

To read the full report, visit RMI website at: https://rmi.org/insight/whole-system-zero-emissions-demonstration/