Limiting global warming to within 1.5 °C might require large-scale deployment of premature negative emission technologies with potentially adverse effects on the key sustainable development goals. Biochar has been proposed as an established technology for carbon sequestration with co-benefits in terms of soil quality and crop yield. However, the considerable uncertainties that exist in the potential, cost, and deployment strategies of biochar systems at national level prevent its deployment in China. Here, we conduct a spatially explicit analysis to investigate the negative emission potential, economics, and priority deployment sites of biochar derived from multiple feedstocks in China. Results show that biochar has negative emission potential of up to 0.92 billion tons of CO₂ per year with an average net cost of US$90 per ton of CO₂ in a sustainable manner, which could satisfy the negative emission demands in most mitigation scenarios compatible with China’s target of carbon neutrality by 2060.

Understanding the underlying forces of China’s climate governance, and assessing the effectiveness of China’s climate institutions, are critical to the global climate governance architecture. This paper reviews the evolution of China’s climate governance system over the past three decades, and examines how factors such as socioeconomic transitions, cognitive shifts associated with climate change, as well as international climate politics have influenced China’s climate institutions. We argue that the evolution of climate governance is influenced by the varying dynamics between climate change and Chinese state’s quest for performance legitimacy. The positive co-benefits between climate change, energy conservation and environment quality triggered the creation of a dedicated climate agency, which then become an anchor to China’s Five-Year Plan and a centerpiece of climate policy communities. The announcement of a climate neutrality target marked a new moment for China as climate change become a new source of performance legitimacy.

National and global mitigation scenarios consistent with 1.5°C require an early phase-out of coal in major coal-dependent countries, compared to standard technical and economic lifetimes. This appears particularly apparent in the light of recent massive investments in coal power capacity, the significant pipeline of coal power capacity coming online, as well as upstream supporting infrastructure. This article analyses the existing and planned capital stock in the coal power sector in the light of scenarios consistent with 1.5°C. The article analyses the political economy and labour aspects of this abrupt and significant transition, in the light of domestic equity and development objectives. Firstly, the article examines employment issues and reviews the existing literature and practice with support schemes for regional and sectoral structural adjustment for the reduction of coal sector activity. Secondly, the paper surveys the domestic political economy of coal sector transition in major coal using countries, namely Australia, South Africa, China and India. A final section provides conclusions and policy recommendations. Key policy insights

The hydrological system of thebasin of Lake Urmia is complex, deriving its supply from a network comprising 13 perennial rivers, along withnumerous small springs and direct precipitation onto the lake’s surface. Among these contributors, approximately half of the inflow is attributed to the Zarrineh River and the Simineh River. Remarkably, Lake Urmia lacks a natural outlet, with its water loss occurring solely through evaporation processes. This study employed a comprehensive methodology integrating ground surveys, remote sensing analyses, and meticulous documentation of historical landslides within the basin as primary information sources. Through this investigative approach, we preciselyidentified and geolocated a total of 512 historical landslide occurrences across the Urmia Lake drainage basin, leveraging GPS technology for precision. Thisarticle introduces a suite of hybrid machine learning predictive models, such as support-vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), decision trees (DT), logistic regression (LR), fuzzy logic (FL), and the technique for order of preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS). These models were strategically deployed to assess landslide susceptibility within the region. The outcomes of the landslide susceptibility assessment reveal that the main high susceptible zones for landslide occurrence are concentrated in the northwestern, northern, northeastern, and some southern and southeastern areas of the region. Moreover, when considering the implementation of predictions using different algorithms, it became evident that SVM exhibited superior performance regardingboth accuracy (0.89) and precision (0.89), followed by RF, with and accuracy of 0.83 and a precision of 0.83. However, it is noteworthy that TOPSIS yielded the lowest accuracy value among the algorithms assessed.

SO₂ emissions have been declining in China recently. The emission reduction has mainly been achieved engineering reduction, structural reduction, and administrative reduction. In this paper, three key industries (electricity generation, steel, and cement) are selected to measure the effects of SO₂ emission reductions, the synergy effects of energy saving, and CO₂ emission reduction. The main results show that, during the period of the ‘11th Five-Year Plan’, engineering reduction of coal-fired power plant desulfurization played the most crucial role in the emission reduction; both engineering reduction and structural reduction can achieve low-pollution emission, but the contributions are not the same due to the divergence of relevant industries. Generally speaking, structural reduction can relatively easily achieve the synergy effect of the main pollutants and GHGs; in comparison, however, engineering reduction does not easily achieve the synergy effect. During the ‘13th Five-Year Plan’ period, the following plans are proposed: strengthening the front pollution control, increasing the engineering reduction, narrowing the difference between the pollution reduction engineering ability and the actual pollution reduction effect, and strengthening the supervisory and administrative effect of both the approval of the front end and the running of the middle end. POLICY RELEVANCE China is on the way to realize industrialization and urbanization. The climate-friendly environmental protection strategy is particularly important for rapidly developing countries such as China, because it can address air pollution and climate change issues at the same time in a more economically efficient manner. This paper selects three key industries to evaluate current pollutant control policy synergy effect from the ‘11th Five-Year Plan’ to the ‘12th Five-Year Plan’ period in order to give more sense to policy makers during 13th Five-Year Plan. The estimate of this study shows that the control of pollutants can generally have synergic control effects on GHG emissions and give detailed measures for 13th Five-Year Plan.