China: Qingdao to launch regional carbon trading scheme in 2015

Shandong’s Qingdao city will launch China’s eighth pilot emission trading scheme in 2015, according to the Qingdao Low Carbon Development Plan (2014-2020) released by the Qingdao municipal Development and Reform Commission.

Qingdao will establish the scheme of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission measurement, monitoring and verification in 2015, an official from the commission said. Meanwhile, the regional GHG trading scheme will be in preparation. By 2020, Qingdao is expected to build its low carbon development mechanism and the relevant low carbon policy framework with the regional GHG emission trading scheme launched.

Qingdao emission trading scheme (ETS) will cover the energy production and conversion industry in the preliminary stage and include transportation and construction industries later, a source close to Qingdao ETS told ICIS on Tuesday. Besides, Qingdao will introduce legislation regarding the penalty on the entities failing to fulfill their obligations. In addition, the threshold of entities to be covered in Qingdao ETS is likely to be set at 10,000 tonnes per annum, which would be able to cover 40% of Qingdao’s total emission.

Earlier this year, Qingdao was listed in the second batch of China’s low carbon pilot cities and completed its GHG emission inventory of industry, power generation, thermal production and transportation. Meanwhile, Qingdao announced its targets of lowering its GHG emission of each unit of GDP by 50% from 2005 and 37.8% from 2010 by 2020. And, the forest coverage rate is expected to reach 45% by 2020. Kun Yang