When I played my role as China, I felt as if I was the middle ground for the developed and developing nations, and it was difficult to get other countries to negotiate. Being more developed than countries like India and other developing nations, we were expected to contribute more to global funds. However, being less developed than the United States, we were the largest source of carbon emissions in the world and we had to work to resolve that.
My stances didn’t change much on how the global temperature would stay within 2 degrees Celsius of what it is at now by 2100. I knew that because China was the largest emitter of carbon that we’d have to contribute in a variety of ways, but I figured that afforestation was not one of those ways, which I was correct about. Although it is portrayed in media as a key resolution to the problem of climate change, increasing our afforestation (which is not feasible in a land where so many people rely on agriculture) made a very little impact.
We did however change our ideas on the basis of peak year. We figured that China was going to peak in 2040 and then plateau with no changes, likely due to the fact that their population rates are slowing down as time progresses. So, keeping the peak year as 2040 and then working to reduce carbon emissions in the years following would work best and most plausibly. However, that didn’t make enough of an impact on the climate, so we bumped up the peak year all the way to 2020, which might not be completely realistic, but it was the weight that China had to carry to avoid increasing carbon emissions substantially over the next 20 years. Working on negotiations with the US allowed us to realize that we would need to do that.
We were able to witness the emissions that were cut out from this change. However, no matter what changes we made, we were always the leader in carbon emissions. The footprint that has been left from China is already impactful enough to keep the global temperatures rising at a rate that is more than what is ideal.
The barriers of the proposals we made were that we could not direct much effort towards prevention of deforestation or encouraging afforestation because of the population and emphasis on agriculture. However, we found that to not be very impactful anyways and we found that the impacts we were making as far as contribution to the global funds were much greater. Another barrier though was that the developing nations outside of China were asking for far too much and it was tough to negotiate with them.
We can catalyze change in the US by starting now to reduce carbon emissions. As the US group noted, the political situation in the US could be different in ten years from now, so making sure that this political landscape is focused reducing carbon in case leaders in the future stray from that idea is important.