As China goes all out to deliver on its pledge to peak greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by 2060, from increasing renewable energy use to setting up the world’s largest carbon trading market, local governments and companies are trying to cut emissions at the individual level.
The per capita annual lifestyle carbon emissions of a Chinese citizen was 5 tonnes in 2019, just over a third of the average Canadian’s, according to a report by Berlin-based think tank Hot or Cool Institute in 2021, which studied 10 countries including Finland, the UK, Japan, Brazil and India. However, the nation’s 1.4 billion population made China’s overall lifestyle carbon footprint 13 times bigger than Canada’s in 2019.
This has led to the rise of personal carbon accounting platforms like Carbon88, which are developed based on a bigger carbon trading mechanism called Tanpuhui.
Tanpuhui, a combination of the Mandarin words for “carbon” and “generalised system of preferences”, was first introduced by the government of China’s southern Guangdong province in 2015. It was designed to encourage decarbonisation among individuals, households and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Individual residents can take part in Tanpuhui by setting up accounts on websites and apps developed by local governments and companies. Like Carbon88, these reward them with credits for their sustainable lifestyle choices, which can be used for discounts or public services.
Communities and SMEs can also take part in Tanpuhui by initiating carbon reduction projects such as afforestation programmes and rooftop solar installations. Once these projects are approved, they can use the earned credits to offset their own emissions or sell them to others in need of carbon offsets.
Communities and SMEs can take part in Tanpuhui by initiating carbon reduction projects such as afforestation programmes and rooftop solar installations. Photo: Bloomberg
“Digitalisation is the foundation of Tanpuhui,” said Tao Lan, general manager of Green Inclusive, a Tanpuhui solutions provider in Beijing that helped the city government build a mini app on WeChat to promote sustainability during the Winter Olympics last year.
With apps pervading every facet of daily life, from digital payments to online shopping, individuals inevitably leave a digital trail, making it easy for ubiquitous super apps like WeChat and Alipay to gather personal data related to their carbon footprints, Tao said.
China’s rapid urbanisation and improvements in living standards have also led to a rapid increase in per capita emissions.
In 2017, urban residents generated 270 million tonnes of direct carbon dioxide emissions through their use of electricity, while rural residents emitted 289 million tonnes, according to a report by the Energy Foundation China in 2021.
The US-based non-profit estimates the direct carbon emissions of Chinese citizens will peak at 673 million tonnes in 2037, seven years after the national goal, before declining to 441 million tonnes by 2050.
The population’s indirect emissions, associated with the consumption of goods and services, were about 4.15 billion tonnes in 2017, according to the foundation. They are forecast to rise to about 5 billion tonnes in 2030, before gradually declining to 3.22 billion tonnes by 2050.
“Consumption has become an important aspect restricting the overall green transformation of China’s economy,” the foundation said, adding that the society’s low-carbon transformation will effectively reduce emissions and contribute to the nation’s net-zero goal.
With this in mind, an increasing number of companies and local governments are developing their own Tanpuhui apps. Last May, Ping An Bank launched a “personal carbon account”, which calculates customers’ personal emission reductions based on their spending patterns and rewards users for their green actions.
So far, nearly all of China’s municipal and provincial governments, including Shanghai, Beijing and Shandong, have launched Tanpuhui apps or announced plans to do so.
“It’s undeniable that Tanpuhui has a positive effect in raising citizens’ awareness about climate change, as it encourages them to make lifestyle changes to reduce their carbon footprint,” said Liu Junyan, a Beijing-based climate and energy project leader at Greenpeace. “But it is unlikely to achieve the result the mechanism expects.”
One obvious challenge in popularising Tanpuhui is data security, experts say. It will be an uphill task to get user consent to let the apps keep track of each persons’ carbon footprint, and protect the huge amount of data.
Another challenge is verification of a user’s low-carbon behaviour. For example, Carbon88 requires only a photo. If a user chooses to upload a photo of a switched-off air conditioner to earn carbon credits and immediately turns it back on, there is no actual emission reduction and no way for the platform to find out.
Developing scientific methodologies to calculate the exact emissions from a certain sustainable behaviour is also a major challenge, according to Liu.
“To calculate an individual’s low-carbon behaviour, it’s crucial to find the ‘baseline’ carbon footprint, and see if any additional emission deficit is generated from their behavioural change,” she said, adding that finding the baseline is extremely difficult.
“Compared with the industrial sectors, individual behaviours and choices are difficult to predict, and the associated sources of emissions are complex.”
A screenshot show users on Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu sharing tips on how to earn carbon credits through Tanpuhui programs. Photo: Xiaohongshu
Whether Tanpuhui apps actually encourage users to reduce emissions is still not clear. On Xiaohongshu, the popular Chinese social media app also known as “Little Red Book”, the most popular discussions relating to Tanpuhui are not on sustainable behaviour but tips on how to earn carbon credits quickly and redeem products.
“If consumers, incentivised by the cash coupons they get from participating in Tanpuhui programs, purchase more products they don’t necessarily need, this would actually generate more emissions from their consumption,” said Liu.
Jeff Chen, a vice-president at Shanghai-based carbon management firm MioTech, said the proliferation of Tanpuhui apps was likely to lead to multiple registrations of the same carbon reduction action on different platforms.
“There is a lack of top-down guidance from a national regulatory body, while local governments and enterprises have their own Tanpuhui platforms,” said Chen, whose own company launched a Tanpuhui app in 2021.
Some climate experts were harsher in their criticism of Tanpuhui.
“This is a farce, whether it is led by local governments or big internet companies,” said Lin Boqiang, dean of the China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy at Xiamen University.
Lin pointed out that encouraging citizens to take part in environmentally friendly behaviour by offering incentives is not the way to achieve the objective.
Instead, Lin said that he would like to see a cap-and-trade model that sets a carbon budget for individuals that allows them to trade unused emission allowances, similar to the EU carbon market.
