China Circular Economy

Measures for the Circular Economy in China

The rapid growth of China's material consumption poses profound challenges to sustainable development in the country and the rest of the world.

China is now consuming about half of the world's cement, over 30 per cent of its steel and more than 20 per cent of its aluminum. It is also the leading consumer of fertilizers and the second largest importer of forest products in the world. Decoupling economic growth from material consumption and its impacts on human health and ecosystem well-being is a major policy dilemma that China needs to start tackling during its 11th Five-year Program.

Transforming production and consumption according to the principles of the circular economy would imply major increases in material use efficiency that should also lead to the reduction of material use and pollution in absolute terms.

Our work with the World Bank's Environment and Social Development Sector Unit, East Asia and Pacific Region, and Tsinghua University in Beijing is aimed at developing a system of circular economy indicators. The indicators would track some of the key material stocks and flows of China and help, among others, national strategic planning efforts led by China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

Complementing the approach of our work with the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED) on performance measurement and green accounting, the work on circular economy indicators strives to ensure cross-compliance with mainstream material flow accounting (MFA) methods and the System of Economic and Environmental Accounts (SEEA).

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For more information, please contact IISD's Director of Measurement and Assessment, László Pintér.