Climate Change: Carbon Budgets, Energy Efficiency Improvements, Renewable Energy Systems and Policy Approaches Designed to Reduce Industrial CO2 Emissions

It is widely accepted that energy use and industrial production contribute the majority proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions. Industry is generally the largest consumer of energy and the highest in energy-related CO2 emissions among the major sectors of energy use in any economy (Liu and Ang, 2007). With the increasingly serious resource and environmental problems, many scholars are making great efforts to achieve energy conservation and emissions reduction in all industrial sectors, such as the steel industry (Worrell et al. 1997; Guo and Fu, 2010; Johansson and Söderström, 2011), the electrical power industry (Sun et al., 2015; Zhou et al., 2015) and the cement industry ( Shen et al.,2014; Xu et al., 2012; Ke et al., 2012; and Benhelal et al., 2013). It is essential for us to more fully understand the current quantities of energy used in each sector and to determine how to effectively reduce the fossil carbon footprint in each of them in order to make societal reductions in climate change causing CO2 emissions. Numerous scientists and environmental groups are attempting to set industrial sectoral targets for CO2 reductions and to work on approaches to influence international policies to address global climate change. Many countries, including the United States, the European Union, Canada, and China, have developed and are implementing energy strategies to secure energy resources and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. China is both the largest user of primary energy and the largest producer of cement in the world. As a result of this and of its emissions from other sectors as well, it has become the biggest emitter of CO2 emissions in the world in the last decade. In recent years, the Chinese governments and the academic communities have been investing increasingly more attention to energy saving and to fossil carbon reduction in every societal sector. Based upon recent investigations, solid scientific estimations of the GHGs emissions from many industrial sectors have been made. These data are being used in theoretical and practical work in China to improve energy use efficiency and to work to use more renewable energy sources, so as to reduce the overall fossil carbon footprint per unit of product produced. In this context, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) recently launched the Strategic Pilot Scientific Plan on ‘the Carbon Budget for Coping with Climate Change and Related Issues’, in which the CAS has done the project on ‘Emission Estimations from Energy Use in Cement Production,’ since 2011. Additionally, during the last five years, extensive in-situ sampling and investigative work was done throughout China. Consequently, valuable progress was made in the fields of coal, oil, natural gas, and cement production sectors in China. To illustrate the achievements in China and in comparison with what has been done and is being done in other countries of the world, this workshop will be held at the conference, led jointly by Professor Wei Wei from the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute (SARI) and Professor Lei Shen from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), CAS.