The European Union's plans to impose a "carbon border tax" would hinder the ability of the international community to take a collective action against climate change, China said on Wednesday.
In October, the new European Union climate commissioner Frans Timmermans said work will start on the new tax, which aims to protect European businesses against unfair competition by raising the cost of goods from countries that fail to take effective action against climate change.
At a conference on Wednesday, Chinese Vice Environment Minister Zhao Yingmin cautioned that Europe's plans, along with US President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement of 2015, would seriously harm international efforts to address global warming.
"To preserve multilateralism, we need to give a strong political message," he said. "We need to avoid unilateralism and protectionism from damaging global growth aspirations and countries' willingness to fight against climate change," Zhao added.
Any border tax on the European market would likely increase the price of Chinese goods, and Beijing believes it would violate a core principle of the Paris Climate Change Agreement, which states that richer countries should bear greater responsibility for reducing emissions.
China, the world's largest emitter of climate-warming greenhouse gas, has pledged to bring its emissions to a peak by "around 2030" as part of its national commitments to combat global warming.
The country has also significantly trimmed down carbon intensity levels from 2005 to 2018 by 48.5 percent, two years before schedule, Zhao said.
But the US says the Paris agreement is unfair to US firms because of it does not do enough to tackle emissions from Chinese and Indian rivals.
According to a study published by the United Nations this week, China's total annual emissions stood at around 14 gigatonnes in 2018, more than twice the level of the United States. The per capita emissions from China are about the same volume as those from Japan and the European Union.
China has made great strides on its long-awaited efforts to build a national carbon trading system, said Li Gao, Head of the Environment Ministry's Climate Change Office, in a media conference, but he did not provide a timeline.
Beijing has achieved its 2020 carbon reduction target ahead of schedule, according to the country's Ministry of Ecology and Environment. The ministry said China's carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP had dropped 5 percent from a year earlier, to 45.9 percent lower than in 2005.
