Sustainable mobility in China from a global perspective [editorial]

Reading The Newly Published Synthesis Report (SYR) on Climate Change 2014 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2015), it becomes clear that there is increasing scientific evidence of anthropogenic impact, i.e. influence of human activities, on global climate change. Of particular concern are the continued increases of CO2 emissions and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. The SYR notes that CO2 concentrations are increasing at the fastest observed decadal rate of change (2.0 0.1 ppm/yr) for 20022011 (ibid.: 44). This reflects our summary of the changes of CO2 concentrations using previous IPCC and IEA data (Zhang and Yazdani, 2014). The magnitude of annual CO2 emissions was 30.3 gigatonnes in 2010 and the level of CO2 concentration reached 400 parts per million (ppm) in 2013 (IEA, 2012; IPCC, 2013). Over the period of 23 years between 1990 and 2013 the level of CO2 concentration rose from 353 ppm to 400 ppm giving it an average annual increase of 2.04 ppm/yr. If this trend remains unchanged CO2 concentration will by circa 2037 have reached the level of 450 ppm which is the baseline of CO2 concentration stabilisation used by many researchers for modelling global climate change. The IPCC experts estimate with high confidence that about 50% of the cumulative CO2 emissions generated by human activities during the industrial period between 1750 and 2011 occurred in the last 40 years (IPCC, 2015: 45). Indeed, in the last 30 years or so the world has witnessed marked changes in the contributions of CO2 emissions by some leading nations. As the leading industrialised country the US had been the largest CO2 emission contributor until 2007, when it was overtaken by China. In 1980 the US contributed 25.8% of the 18.0 gigatonnes of world CO2 emissions. In comparison, in the same year China's contribution of CO2 emissions accounted for only 7.9% as shown in Table 1 (IEA, 2012)