[Expert Interpretation] Accelerating the Construction of China's Product Carbon Footprint Management System

[Expert Commentary]

Under the guidance of Xi Jinping's Thought on Ecological Civilization, the Party Central Committee, the State Council, and relevant ministries have made intensive decisions over the past six months, making the construction of a product "carbon footprint" management system a key task in deepening the reform of the ecological civilization system.

This year, the General Office of the State Council issued the "Work Plan for Accelerating the Construction of a Dual Control System for Carbon Emissions," clearly proposing to incorporate carbon emission targets into the national economic and social development plans, and requiring the establishment and improvement of policy systems and management mechanisms such as local carbon assessment, industry carbon control, enterprise carbon management, project carbon evaluation, and product carbon footprint. Prior to this, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and other departments issued corresponding opinions and implementation plans regarding the establishment of a product carbon footprint management system.

Product carbon footprint management is of great significance to China's green and low-carbon development and high-level opening-up.

Carbon footprint refers to the total greenhouse gas emissions generated by a product throughout its entire life cycle (including raw material extraction, processing, manufacturing, transportation, use, disposal, etc.). The country's focus on product carbon footprint mainly considers promoting China's green and low-carbon development and advancing high-level opening-up.

On one hand, carbon footprint management uses products as a lever to drive overall supply chain emission reductions by lowering product carbon footprints, achieving an "indirect" impact on supply chain enterprises with minimal effort. This is a concrete application of a systematic approach in the field of green and low-carbon development, effectively supplementing and improving China's green and low-carbon development institutional system.

On the other hand, product carbon footprint is also an important topic in international cooperation, negotiation, and competition in areas such as climate change. It is a key tool in the green trade barrier policies of European and American countries. By imposing requirements for disclosure, grading, and even admission based on product carbon footprints, it imposes additional burdens and costs on Chinese export enterprises, restricting the development of China's advantageous industries such as electric vehicles, batteries, and photovoltaics.

Therefore, accelerating the construction of a product carbon footprint management system and improving the management level of product carbon footprints in key industries is a major demand for China to promote green and low-carbon development, break international green trade barriers, ensure trade security, promote high-level opening-up, and enhance international discourse power. It is also a key task in practicing General Secretary Xi Jinping's important assertion that "green development is the fundamental color of high-quality development, and new quality productivity itself is green productivity."

Currently, the construction of China's product carbon footprint management system is still in its initial stage, facing practical challenges such as incomplete accounting rules and standards system, lack of internationally recognized and influential background databases, absence of labeling and certification systems, and insufficient professional capabilities. Behind these challenges, the core issue is insufficient scientific understanding of product carbon footprints and a shallow understanding of international rules in this field, resulting in difficulty in unifying domestic requirements and achieving mutual recognition internationally.

Product carbon footprint is calculated using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method. The history of LCA can be traced back to the 1970s. Over the past 50-plus years, European and American countries have conducted long-term, in-depth, and systematic research on LCA and product carbon footprints, establishing scientific, systematic, and universal principles, methods, and requirements, and building corresponding standard systems, thereby forming internationally led discourse power.

Therefore, China should first carry out industry co-construction through top-level design, systematically build a product carbon footprint management system that complies with international rules, and achieve equal dialogue and mutual recognition based on internationally accepted underlying mechanisms. On this basis, for fields where China has advantages, it should lead and redefine the international product carbon footprint management system, establish international discourse power with deep participation and leadership by China, break green trade barriers, ensure trade security, and promote high-level opening-up.

To achieve this goal, the most urgent task currently is to establish a product carbon footprint background database that complies with international rules and truly reflects China's actual situation. Product carbon footprint accounting requires combining real scene and background data. Real scene data refers to traceable data on material and energy inputs and outputs of products, pollutants, and waste in the manufacturing process and supply chain, generally provided by manufacturing and supply chain enterprises. For data that cannot be traced, representative background data by industry and region can be used. For most enterprises, supply chain traceability is extremely difficult, so product carbon footprint accounting heavily relies on background databases. The quality, reliability, and representativeness of background databases significantly affect accounting results. Due to the lack of credible and internationally recognized local databases, China currently mainly uses background databases developed in Europe and the United States, whose data related to China are outdated, unrepresentative, and unreliable, failing to reflect China's leading process technology level and comparative advantages, resulting in data being a "bottleneck."

Therefore, China urgently needs to establish a product carbon footprint background database that truly reflects the current status of China's process technology level and regional differences among provinces, as well as corresponding data aggregation and update mechanisms, to help Chinese enterprises more accurately and reliably calculate their product carbon footprints, effectively respond to green trade barriers, and promote overall supply chain emission reductions from dimensions such as technology research and development, product design, and supply chain management.

Since product carbon footprint accounting involves most industries in the national economy, the background database should also have a high industry coverage. Moreover, China is vast, and the process technology levels vary greatly across regions, making the construction of China's background database a challenging, large-scale, and time-sensitive task.

The advantages of the national system should be fully utilized, leveraging China's complete industrial system. Under unified national deployment, a product carbon footprint industry organization should be established, uniting various strengths to build a multi-party participation, cooperative co-construction, and open-sharing database construction mechanism, quickly forming a carbon footprint background database that reflects China's advantages and continuously iterating and improving it; meanwhile, actively carry out international exchanges, build mutual trust, achieve mutual recognition, and lay a solid data foundation for the establishment of China's carbon footprint management system.