A Guidebook for Low-Carbon Development at the Local Level

This report aims to provide a manual with a menu of the successful policies and measures for local governments in China to create low carbon plan or climate action plans. This manual includes a comprehensive list of successful policies and best practices. This report does not intend to provide independent evaluation or analysis of the GHG emission reduction or cost-effectiveness of each policy,but rather to provide the climate action plan guide and policy based on existing literature, documents and reports.

This report consists of three parts. The first section is designed as a manual to help local governments create an action plan to tackle climate change and to increase energy efficiency. It provides a simple step-by-step description of how the action plans could be established and the essential elements to be included in a plan, from preparing a GHG emission inventory to implementation of the plan. Examples from the successful network of Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) are introduced, and the experience and methodology in developing local climate action plans, along with the tools developed to assist such activities, are provided as reference.

The second section of this report provides information on policies and actions to achieve low carbon growth in the following sectors: Cross-cutting (not focused on a specific end-use sector), Industry,Buildings, Transportation, Power, Agriculture and Forestry. For each policy or action identified in each sector, the following information is included, where available:

• Description
• Performance metric
• GHG emission reduction potential
• Cost-effectiveness

The policies draw on international examples, including both national and state or provincial level measures. Chinese approaches are also included if they are considered to be successful or innovative.The third section of this report is a matrix that summarizes all the successful policies and measures identified in the first section, providing users with a menu of options so that they can easily compare options and make choices sector by sector.