Xi Jinping's announcement that China will stop funding overseas coal projects could buy the world about three more months in the race to keep global heating to a relatively safe level of 1.5C, experts say.
Although the impact will depend on implementation(实施), China's declaration should also help to kill off coal, which has been humanity's primary power source for most of the last 200 years.
The immediate impact is likely to be felt in the countries that rely most heavily on Chinese funding for new coal projects. The governments in these nations will now have to decide whether to find alternative funding from the private sector, where the borrowing costs can be high — as Pakistan has recently found out — or whether to shift to renewables, which Xi has promised to support.
Despite the uncertainties over implementation, Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, said China's announcement would accelerate decarbonisation. "Countries now know that going forward, there is no financing on the table for coal. That should clarify things a lot."
Another positive knock-on effect would be to push Japan to follow suit. The government in Tokyo has already taken steps in this direction but left a door open for financing by its private-sector institutions. Their geopolitical reason had been that they did not want to leave China as the only option for regional energy projects. With Xi's announcement, they now have no excuse not to slam the door shut for good. Likewise for South Korea, formerly one of the world's biggest coal backers, which has recently moved towards decarbonisation.