Upon completion, China’s national emissions trading scheme (C-ETS) will be the largest carbon market in the world. Recent research has evaluated China’s seven pilot ETSs launched from 2013 on, and academic literature on design aspects of the C-ETS abounds. Yet little is known about the specific details of the upcoming C-ETS. This article combines currently understood details of China’s national carbon market with lessons learned in the pilot schemes as well as from the academic literature. Our review follows the taxonomy of Emissions Trading in Practice: A Handbook on Design and Implementation (Partnership for Market Readiness & International Carbon Action Partnership. (2016). Retrieved from www.worldbank.org): The 10 categories are: scope, cap, distribution of allowances, use of offsets, temporal flexibility, price predictability, compliance and oversight, stakeholder engagement and capacity building, linking, implementation and improvements.
Key policy insights
Accurate emissions data is paramount for both design and implementation, and its availability dictates the scope of the C-ETS.
The stakeholder consultative process is critical for effective design, and China is able to build on its extensive experience through the pilot ETSs.
Current policies and positions on intensity targets and Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) credits constrain the market design of the C-ETS.
Most critical is the nature of the cap. The currently discussed rate-based cap with ex post adjustment is risky. Instead, an absolute, mass-based emissions cap coupled with the conditional use of permits would allow China to maintain flexibility in the carbon market while ensuring a limit on CO2 emissions.
Soil containing calcic nodules is widely present on the northern Loess Plateau of China owing to soil genesis under local climate conditions. In most studies, little attention is payed to the effect of calcic nodules on soil evaporation and ecoenvironment, resulting in inaccurate evaporation estimation in this kind of soil and further improper field water management measures and irrigation effects. In this paper, soil column experiments were conducted in order to investigate evaporation process in soil containing calcic nodules and the effect of calcic nodules on soil evaporation was determined. The results indicated that evaporation reduction was positively related to calcic nodule content (CNC = mass of calcic nodules/total mass), and could be estimated by the experiential equation: Esoil = E0 (1 – 0.4 CNC) (Esoil = actual evaporation, E0 = theory evaporation in soil without calcic nodules). When CNC was below 0.2, the impact could be neglected. While, as CNC exceeded 0.2, the impact needed to be considered during soil evaporation estimation. As CNC reached 0.5, soil evaporation could be reduced by 7.5 mm, accounting for around 10% of the total soil water. Water balance calculation in soil columns showed that water absorbed by calcic nodules was partially available to evaporation. Water available to evaporation was positively related to CNC, and this water could not exceed 63% of the water absorbed by calcic nodules. Generally, evaporation behavior was dominated by calcic nodule quantity and its water absorption. These results provide new ideas for irrigation measures in arid areas of the globe. 相似文献