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Putting climate on the agenda

China Briefing 2022

Physics World

 
Welcome Physics World  September 2022

Putting climate on the agenda

Welcome to the 2022 Physics World Briefing China.

When most of the world was dealing with the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which forced lockdowns and an intense effort to create the first vaccines, China was setting out to tackle another huge scientific issue of our time: the climate. In a surprise announcement to the UN general assembly in September 2020, Chinese president Xi Jinping laid out the country’s plan to transition from one of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters to a “net zero” carbon society by 2060.

The move, which was not widely reported in the west, even came as a surprise to regional government officials in China who are still processing what the goal means and what policies they need to adopt to meet it. In this briefing, we outline how China could achieve this ambitious goal via the roll-out of renewable energy, the installation of carbon capture, adding new usage and storage technologies to existing coal power stations along, perhaps, with a renaissance of nuclear power (“China sets out its climate ambitions”). 

While there is much focus on meeting net zero on the energy supply side, the demand side deserves equal attention too. This includes how to persuade more people to use electric vehicles and how to integrate solar panels into residential buildings. For a country that emits more greenhouse gases than any other nation, curbing emissions will represent a paradigm shift, not just for government, but for every citizen as well. 

This year’s briefing takes a look at several other scientific areas that China is focusing on, not least quantum technologies (see “Leap for quantum advantage in optical and superconducting systems” and “The quantum battleground”). We examine a new upgrade to the Beijing Electron Positron Collider that when complete in 2024 will see the current collision rate triple and extend the maximum collision energy to 5.6 GeV (see “Particle collider gets major upgrade”). Particle physicists in China are hoping that those developments may help to persuade officials to build a dedicated “Higgs factory” to do precision measurements of the Higgs boson, but such a 100 km-circumference collider will come at a cost.

The previous decade has also seen China excel in space, with the launch of several Moon missions. In the briefing we talk to Thomas Smith from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics Chinese Academy of Sciences about analysing some of the first lunar samples that have been brought back from the Chang’e-5 sample-return mission (see “Lunar explorer”). 

I hope you enjoy this briefing and please let us know your comments by e-mailing pwld@iop.org.