The 31st UN Climate Change Conference (COP31) will take place in Antalya, Türkiye, from 9 to 20 November 2026, bringing together countries to discuss the next steps in global climate action. Against this backdrop, the following article is contributed by Arvea Marieni, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for China and Globalization (CCG).
Marieni is a strategy adviser, climate policy expert, and innovation manager specialising in EU–China environmental cooperation, an area in which she has worked since 2001.
She is Director of Engineering Solutions for the Ecological Transition at BEAM CUBE, a French engineering company, Senior Adviser to the World Green Design Organization, and a Visiting Scholar at Tsinghua University’s Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development.
She is also a European Climate Pact Ambassador and a jury member of the European Innovation Council Accelerator. Earlier in her career, she led an innovation programme on renewable energy and energy efficiency at Italy’s AREA Science Park and held senior roles in the waste management industry, including overseeing market development in China and Europe.
THE GREAT REBALANCING
Turning Two Decades of EU–China Green Cooperation into Shared Rules, and Rules into Competitive Industry
For two decades the EU and its member states invested in China’s green transition, and China’s industry has since cut the cost of Europe’s: green growth in China, a cheaper transition in Europe. But the gains have diverged: China has turned the transition into growth, while the EU, by implementing its own green industrial policies inconsistently and piecemeal, let China leapfrog it. Ahead of COP31 and the 2027 talks on what follows the 2030 Agenda, that shared record, not a retreat into defence, is where common rules should start. The systems-engineering method behind China’s Beautiful China plan shows how to build them together, turn them into joint industrial projects and strengthen the EU’s industrial base.
On the road to the COP
The eighth Friends of the Paris Agreement High-Level Dialogue was held in Paris on 19–20 October 2026 and co-chaired by Xie Zhenhua, China’s former Special Envoy for Climate Change, and Laurence Tubiana, France’s former climate ambassador and CEO of the European Climate Foundation (Xinhua, 2026a). There, Chinese experts argued that climate governance has moved from a consensus on ideas to implementation, and that cooperation with the European Union should rest on “rules, science and innovative practice" (Xinhua, 2026b). The EU should take this as an offer. For years, I have been convinced that matching industrial standards is what will cut the Gordian knot that ties climate negotiations to competitiveness: the nascent post-fossil economy needs a comprehensive system of new rules.1 COP31 opens in Antalya in a few days, and within a year the United Nations will begin to discuss what follows the 2030 Agenda. In the EU, meanwhile, the industry ministers of fifteen member states have called for a more defensive industrial policy (Warsaw Declaration, 2026). The question is through what mechanism the goals of the post-2030 agenda will be integrated, measured and verified, what will drive their implementation, and how the EU and China can build that mechanism together, so that each strengthens the other’s industrial base instead of eroding it.
Elsewhere, there is an outline of the pillars and structure of what such a system could look like (Marieni and Clini, 2019; Marieni and Vineis, 2023). Building it is a systems-engineering task. Its elements already exist in EU climate and nature law and in China’s Beautiful China plan, which derives requirements from environmental limits, cascades them into staged targets and connects them through accounting and standards. Since 2017 China has framed its global environmental vision as a “clean and beautiful world”, tied at home to high-quality development. Its experts now strive to take that vision to the world after 2030 and to integrate sustainable development effectively into it (Wang, 2026), as part of China’s more active stance on the international stage. Far from being a burden, green innovation has become central to China’s development: clean-energy sectors drove more than a third of its GDP growth in 2025 (Myllyvirta and Schaepe, 2026). The Beautiful China model can therefore be read, implicitly, as an offer: a basis for cooperation on method.
This runs into what this article calls the Copenhagen paradox2: the two sides agree on the goals but contest the rules of production, competition, cost and access to resources. Resolving the paradox starts with rebalancing. For more than two decades the EU’s cooperation with China, budgeted largely as aid, worked in practice as an investment in China’s sustainable development, transferring methods, standards and know-how that shaped how China builds its green competitiveness. Chinese leaders and institutions have acknowledged that contribution, as this article shows. China, for its part, built through its own industrial policy a green industrial base that now competes with the EU’s own and has lowered the cost of the transition for all. The EU should remember its own earlier contribution and recognise China’s, and China should account for the EU’s, within a shared account of what each side has given the other. The argument follows a sequence that Hu Bin of Tsinghua University’s Institute for Climate Change and Sustainable Development (ICCSD) asked me to make explicit: industrial capabilities shift first, distributional pressures follow, negotiated arrangements address those pressures, and common standards and engineering tools then implement and verify the arrangements, without replacing them (Hu, 2026b). On that basis, parts of both models can be transferred, and convergence can be engineered into practice, through design requirements implemented and verified in the design and simulation tools, such as virtual twins, used by engineers and planners on both sides. The article concludes with four steps for the EU, sequenced so that what can be done before the 2027 SDG Summit, and tested by 2030, lays the basis for the longer-term objectives: an integrated post-2030 agenda and shared rules of production anchored in law. Several of its recommendations converge with the aims of the Warsaw Declaration, and together they show how climate and environmental performance indicators can be turned into green innovation and competitiveness.
Goals without an integrated mechanism
Seven of the nine planetary boundaries have now been transgressed. Ocean acidification became the latest to cross its boundary, in 2025 (Planetary Boundaries Science, 2026). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were not designed for this situation. The SDGs set seventeen parallel objectives, monitored but never integrated, as though growth, welfare and the Earth system could be optimised separately and then added together: nothing resolves the trade-offs between them or turns them into binding, staged targets. In engineering terms, they specified the outputs without designing the system meant to produce them.
The economics of nature has been rebuilt in the same fragmented way. Climate, biodiversity and water have each received their own revaluation (Stern, 2006; Dasgupta, 2021; Global Commission on the Economics of Water, 2024), just as climate, biodiversity and land each received their own convention at Rio in 1992. Mazzucato (2018) shows how the marginalist turn made price the proof of value, so that whatever the market does not price, including the functioning of ecosystems, enters the national accounts as zero. Chinese economists of ecological civilisation have reached a parallel critique by a different route. Pan (2016) frames ecological civilisation as a paradigm founded on ecological boundary lines. Zhang (2023) shows that a change of development paradigm can turn the trade-offs between economy, environment and well-being into mutual reinforcement. Mission-oriented economics supplies a direction without limits, and the science of planetary boundaries supplies the limits without the institutions to enforce them. The post-2030 agenda needs both, held together in a single objective.
History explains why this matters now. In The Great Divergence (2000), the historian Kenneth Pomeranz challenged the long-held view that Europe pulled ahead of China because of superior institutions, culture or science. Around 1750, he showed, the most advanced regions of both, the Yangzi delta and England, were comparable in living standards and commercial development, and both faced the same ecological wall: land could no longer supply enough food, fibre, fuel and timber. Britain broke through thanks to two accidents rather than merit: coal seams close to its industrial heartland, and the “ghost acres” of the Americas, which provided cotton, sugar and timber that would otherwise have required land Britain did not have. That escape was found, not made.
What I call the “Pomeranz inversion” is this story run in reverse. Today the wall has returned, but the binding constraint is no longer the land that grows energy; it is the atmosphere and the ecosystems that absorb the consequences of its use. The way out runs through energy flows that have to be manufactured: solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electrolysers and grids, and the capacity to make them now lies largely with China. Coal does not move; learning curves do. In the first divergence, advantage went to whoever found the resources to escape the wall; in the second, it goes to whoever can make the escape, and China, which missed the first, has moved faster on the second. That is why industrial capability, rather than climate ambition, now sits at the centre of EU–China friction. The second escape will be determined by design and institutions, which makes it replicable in principle and, for that very reason, contested in practice.
There is a caveat, however. The manufactured escape still rests on geology, and access to critical raw materials is a chokepoint: China refines most of the world’s supply of several of them, and its export controls of 2025 showed how quickly that position can be turned into leverage (IEA, 2025). China’s advantage is temporary, though not short-lived. Processing capacity can be built elsewhere and recycling can recover what is already in use, but new mines and refineries take more than a decade to bring into production, and know-how is now controlled as tightly as materials. Above all, they bring the land constraint back. Today’s ghost acres are mined rather than farmed, often in third countries, and it is in the interest of all parties, producer countries included, to reconcile extraction with spatial planning and the protection of land and natural resources. The way through is to move beyond an economy built on ever more material throughput: the transition replaces fuels burned once with metals that can be designed for long life, recovered and used again, and whoever masters that loop, rather than simply the deposits, will hold the advantage. For policy, the implication is that the missing feature of the global agenda is integration rather than ambition.
China’s operating model
China has been building such an integrating mechanism in stages for two decades. In 2004 Hu Jintao called for green national accounting, and in 2006 the environment agency and the National Bureau of Statistics published China’s first green GDP report, which remains the only one issued in the government’s name (Wang, 2016, 2021). The Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning kept the work going. It now holds green GDP accounts from 2004 to 2020 and national accounts of gross ecosystem product from 2014, combined in a single measure of gross economic-ecological product (Wang et al., 2021). That ledger is, in effect, an answer to Mazzucato’s zero.
Ecological civilisation entered the Party’s Congress report in 2007, the Party Constitution in 2012 (the year the goal of a Beautiful China was set) and the state Constitution in 2018. In July 2026 the State Council published the first five-year plan named after Beautiful China, together with a carbon peaking action plan that sets, for 2030, a 17 per cent cut in carbon intensity from 2025 and a 25 per cent non-fossil share of energy consumption (State Council of the PRC, 2026a, 2026b). These sit alongside China’s 2035 commitment to cut economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions by 7–10 per cent from their peak (People’s Republic of China, 2025). The plan is held together by one formula: to advance in coordination the reduction of carbon, the reduction of pollution, the expansion of green space and growth (降碳、减污、扩绿、增长), with milestones for 2027 and 2035 (CPC Central Committee and State Council, 2023; Qin et al., 2024). The formula does what the Rio conventions have so far failed to do. It holds climate, land and biodiversity within a single objective, and writes growth into that objective instead of leaving it outside as a condition to be negotiated afterwards.
Systems engineering as a method of governance
The method matters more than the targets. The building of a Beautiful China is described as a project of systems engineering, whose core requirement is to keep economic activity within the limits that resources and the environment can bear (Wang et al., 2025). The phrase is literal. Chinese planning has drawn on systems engineering since Qian Xuesen brought it from aerospace into national management (Qian, Xu and Wang, 1978). Requirements are derived from limits, and the objective is decomposed into targets (Wang et al., 2022). The interfaces between the parts are specified through accounting and standards, performance is verified, and each plan cycle feeds back into the next. Dan Wang (2025) calls China an engineering state, and Beautiful China shows that engineering state turning to law: the Ecological and Environmental Code took effect in August 2026 as the legal infrastructure of this shift (Marieni, 2026).
That China is succeeding in building a post-fossil, less resource-intensive economy driven by green innovation is now a recurrent claim, in China and abroad, and the evidence increasingly supports it. The carbon-neutrality pledge shows the method at work. Three weeks after Xi Jinping’s announcement in September 2020, Tsinghua University’s Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development, led by Xie Zhenhua, published the study that underpinned it. Begun in 2019 and coordinated by He Jiankun, Li Zheng and Zhang Xiliang, the study integrated eighteen workstreams into a single strategy indexed to the milestones of Beautiful China (He et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2021). Its 2030 figures were announced two months later and formalised in the updated NDC of 2021. One of its findings matters for Europe: the transition is more expensive to build but cheaper to run, and by 2050 total energy costs fall below those of the current-policy scenario. In practice, China is fast-tracking the transition as a way to secure energy independence and strategic autonomy, and the transition has become a driver of growth. Clean-energy sectors contributed 11.4 per cent of China’s GDP in 2025 and more than a third of its growth; without them, the economy would have grown by 3.5 per cent instead of 5.0 (Myllyvirta and Schaepe, 2026). In the first half of 2026, new growth drivers in high-end manufacturing, the digital economy and modern services, which Beijing presents as its “new quality productive forces”, accounted for more than 40 per cent of growth (Economic Daily, 2026). Is the same true for the EU? Not yet: the EU has the legal machinery, but not the integration that would make its decisions cohere.
China’s model is not a template. China commissioned 78 GW of new coal power in 2025 (Carbon Brief, 2026), even as clean energy was driving its emissions down (Seligsohn and Hu, 2025). Climate Action Tracker (2025) judges its 2035 target “conservative”, and Wang Jinnan himself concedes that environmental improvement remains at a low-to-medium level (Wang, 2026, written comments). China’s escape also relies on overseas frontiers of lithium, cobalt and nickel (Kalantzakos, 2018; IEA, 2025). Yet Chinese targets are set to be overachieved: the 2030 wind and solar goal of 1,200 GW was passed in July 2024 (Lewis, 2025). Coal utilisation has fallen from about 60 per cent in 2011 to around 51 per cent in 2025, so much of the new capacity is built to stand by as back-up for a grid that renewables increasingly supply. CREA and Global Energy Monitor warn that this still risks locking capital into fossil fuels (Qin et al., 2026). What the EU should take from China is therefore the architecture, not the institutions.
The case for rebalancing is strong both ways
Weeks after the Green Deal was presented, Clini warned that, without corrective action, supporting the decarbonisation of China and India would erode the competitiveness of the developed economies, and called for “reciprocity and non-competitive cooperation” (Clini, 2020).
Events have borne this out. Caught in the double bind of accelerating climate impacts and rising costs, the EU is tempted to retreat into market defence, when it should move forward with confidence and take the initiative. The Warsaw Declaration, signed in 2026 by the industry ministers of fifteen member states, among them France, Germany, Italy and Poland, shows both the temptation and the opening. The EU’s concerns are real: competitiveness in clean-technology manufacturing, where Brussels sees what it defines as overcapacity; dependence on Chinese processing of critical minerals; and the use of export controls as leverage. The Declaration’s call for a more gradual emissions-reduction trajectory under the EU Emissions Trading System, and for keeping free allowances as a safeguard against carbon leakage, can be read as a retreat from climate ambition (Warsaw Declaration, 2026). Read more closely, it confirms the diagnosis of this article. The ministers do not question decarbonisation; they contest the rules of production, competition, cost and access to resources. That is the Copenhagen paradox, stated at ministerial level. They ask for “competitiveness by design” and for an assessment of the cumulative impact of EU policies: a call for integration, centred on competitiveness rather than on planetary limits, but built on the same method this article proposes. They seek European capacity to process and recycle critical raw materials, and lead markets governed by Union-origin and low-carbon criteria. This is the ground on which production capacity in Europe, including investment from China under the right conditions, can meet shared rules. And they insist that the EU should become more resilient without becoming more protectionist. Trade defence can buy time; it cannot set the rules. Without cooperation, the transition, in trade and production alike, becomes more expensive for everyone. The EU’s strengths lie in its standards, its engineering, its regulatory design and the Brussels Effect they produce; rebalancing through common rules puts them to work. Rebalancing is the answer to the EU’s concerns, not a way around them. It is also broader than the trade-balance meaning the word has acquired in Brussels: it concerns who holds the capabilities and who shares in the gains.
Adapting lessons from the past
Convergence is therefore possible, and it has a history. EU–China cooperation followed China’s own method: pilots first, then law, plan and binding target. From 2000 the Sino-Italian Cooperation Program for Environmental Protection ran projects on energy efficiency, renewables, clean transport and environmental management, and trained a generation of Chinese officials and engineers. By 2009 it had mobilised some €264 million, of which €170 million came from the Italian ministry and €40 million from Chinese matching funds (Fang, 2013; China Environment News, 2009). Its projects went on to reach all 31 of China’s provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. From 2003, an advanced training programme run with Venice International University brought Chinese officials, researchers and technicians to Venice; by 2013 it counted more than 10,000 participants, many of them involved in designing China’s path to sustainable development (MASE, n.d.; Venice International University, 2013). Italy also used the programme to open China’s environmental market to Italian companies: the account ran both ways from the start. In 2004 Italy, the World Bank and China set up a trust fund to turn the circular economy from a waste policy into a development strategy (Fang, 2013). Within four years the pilots had fed into the 11th Five-Year Plan and the Circular Economy Promotion Law of 2008 (Qi et al., 2016). By 2014 Xie Zhenhua, then vice-chairman of the NDRC, called the circular economy the necessary path to building an ecological civilisation (NDRC, 2014). The EU’s emissions-trading programmes helped to prepare China’s national carbon market (European Commission, 2017, 2018). Italy was not alone. Denmark’s wind energy development programme from 2005 and its renewable energy programme from 2009 helped establish the China National Renewable Energy Centre, now a leading policy research centre within China’s Energy Research Institute (Danish Energy Agency, n.d.). Germany has supported the design of China’s regional and national emissions trading schemes since 2012, training more than 5,000 Chinese officials and industry experts (Climate Cooperation China, n.d.a). Other member states have their own chapters.
Chinese counterparts have acknowledged this cooperation. Zhu Rongji praised the Italian cooperation at the Johannesburg summit in 2002, and the environment ministry’s newspaper, China Environment News, called it “a model of bilateral environmental cooperation between developed and developing countries” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC, 2002; China Environment News, 2009). It nevertheless ran largely in one direction. The EU and its member states transferred methods, standards and know-how, and China, through its own industrial policy, built an industrial base that now competes with the EU’s own. China has in turn contributed to Europe: by manufacturing at scale, it has lowered the cost of Europe’s transition (IEA, 2022).
The task now is to rebalance the relationship, and it is the first condition for common rules. The EU should remember its own earlier contribution and recognise China’s, and China should account for the EU’s, within a shared account of what each side has given the other. This is not a debt to be repaid, but a record that both sides keep. On that basis, the two sides can reach agreements on the ecological economy, on production capacity in Europe, on shared standards and on joint investment in mitigation and adaptation. In this way each side can strengthen the other’s industrial base: Chinese investment producing in Europe under shared low-carbon criteria, common standards that widen both markets, joint recycling and traceability of critical raw materials, with processing to follow as trust grows, and a division of labour that pairs China’s scale and speed of deployment with the EU’s certification, simulation and lifecycle software and power electronics. This is competitive cooperation: the two blocs keep competing on production while cooperating on the rules.
An instrument for this existed. In December 2020 the EU and China concluded in principle the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, which bound China for the first time to bilateral commitments on implementing the Paris Agreement and on not lowering environmental and labour standards to attract investment (European Commission, 2020a). Five months later the European Parliament froze its ratification after Beijing sanctioned several of its members, in retaliation for EU sanctions over Xinjiang (European Parliament, 2021). The agreement has stayed in limbo, although those sanctions were lifted in April 2025. This is the paradox in its purest form: the one framework that could have turned shared goals into shared rules of production was stalled for reasons that lay outside climate and industrial policy (Clini, 2025).
Some opportunities for mutually beneficial action
The experts in Paris described the terrain where rebalancing can begin and argued that the two sides should manage their green-industrial friction and cooperation together, and involve businesses, think tanks and academia far more than they do today. Wang Yi, vice chair of the National Expert Committee on Climate Change, a researcher at the Institutes of Science and Development of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and leader of one of the workstreams of the 2020 Tsinghua study, reiterated the key role of the Paris Agreement as an institutional framework for implementation. He pointed out that electrification targets are insufficient without a power system engineered to absorb high shares of renewables, and noted that China has accumulated extensive experience in building its new energy and power systems and is ready to share what it has learnt with other countries (Xinhua, 2026b; He et al., 2020). Li Zheng, Dean of Tsinghua University’s ICCSD, noted that the global energy transition is still advancing but that its momentum has been eroded by weakening political will in some countries, pointing to growing barriers to green investment, obstacles to technology deployment and lagging grids. These are all obstacles that stronger international cooperation can help to overcome. Through research and deployment at scale, he noted, China has driven down the cost of solar, wind, batteries and electric vehicles, giving the world more affordable options for the transition (Xinhua, 2026b). Li Zheng’s research explains why grids lag behind. A transmission line takes five to ten years to build, while a wind or solar project takes one to five, so peak shortfalls favour fossil plants and raise the risk of “carbon lock-in” (Du, Zhang and Li, 2023). A 2024 study calls the shortage of flexibility the core contradiction of a high-renewables system (Li et al., 2024).
Distributed generation is part of the answer. In China, rooftop and commercial arrays accounted for 36 GW of the 60 GW of solar added in the first quarter of 2025 (Rystad Energy, 2025). The model is now travelling along Chinese supply chains, largely without a plan behind it. Pakistan imported some 51 GW of Chinese panels between 2018 and early 2026, and solar cushioned the country during the 2026 Iran war crisis (Nasir, 2026). Nigeria leads a similar take-off across Africa (Ember, 2025). Where such booms spread without rules, or outpace regulation, net metering shifts the cost of the grid onto those who cannot afford panels. Grid codes, metering, storage and interoperability standards are the common rules that turn a spontaneous boom into a stable system. They are where European and Chinese engineering can meet, starting with metering, storage and interoperability; grid codes and grid equipment raise security questions and need a framework of safeguards first.
Multilateral diplomacy has reached the same conclusion, at least as an aspiration. In Belém the presidencies of the three conventions agreed to work towards a shared workplan for 2026, a triple COP year: land in Ulaanbaatar in August, biodiversity in Yerevan in October and climate at COP31 in Antalya in November. Decision 16/22 of the biodiversity convention (CBD, 2024) had already opened work on policy coherence, including a possible joint work programme. At Ulaanbaatar a Türkiye-led process was launched towards a voluntary, country-led Rio Synergies Group for Action, to be formally launched at COP31 (UNCCD, 2026). The same meeting showed how fragile this convergence remains. The United States objected to the agenda items on gender, civil society participation and cooperation with the other Rio conventions; no decision on synergies was adopted, and the item was deferred to COP18. The agenda remains voluntary, procedural and politically exposed, and the SDG era has shown that voluntary coordination is not enough. Convergence will come less from the secretariats than from common rules (metrics, standards, permits, finance criteria and procurement) that change how the real economy works.
Language matters too
The formula of a “clean and beautiful world” (共建清洁美丽世界) dates from Xi Jinping’s Geneva speech of 2017 (Xi, 2017). In written comments on a draft of this article, Wang Jinnan identified as one of his key ideas “how, in the post-2030 era, to take the clean and beautiful world to the world, or in other words, how to integrate sustainable development effectively into the building of a clean and beautiful world” (Wang, 2026). In Brussels or New York, the formula could be read as the adoption of a state narrative. The bridge already exists in UN text: the 2050 Vision of the biodiversity convention, “living in harmony with nature” (CBD, 2022), corresponds closely to 人与自然和谐共生, the core term of ecological civilisation. Ecological civilisation can therefore be presented as one of several traditions converging on a shared vision, rather than as the vision itself (Goron, 2018; Hansen, Li and Svarverud, 2018). The EU should therefore frame its offer as rebalancing through common rules, expressed in UN language that both sides already share.
What can be transferred, and how
The mechanism can be separated from the political system that runs it in China. The institutions that enforce it cannot be transferred. The engineering approach can, together with the rules that define it: an integrated objective anchored in planetary limits, cascaded time horizons, spatial planning, ecosystem accounting and convergent standards. Part of this already exists multilaterally. The UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounting (United Nations et al., 2021) gives China’s ecosystem-product accounts and the EU’s natural-capital accounts a common standard on which to converge. The method applies both ways, because the same systems logic already underpins industrial practice in the EU and in China: product lifecycle management, industrial ecology, lean engineering extended into total resource efficiency, and enhanced life cycle assessment.
What is missing is the layer through which these rules reach the real economy. A standard written into a regulation changes nothing until it shapes how a product is designed, a plant is permitted, a building is procured or a territory is planned. Up to 80 per cent of a product’s environmental impact is determined at the design stage (European Commission, 2020b), which is why the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation writes requirements into the concept phase (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781). Virtual twins, built with systems-engineering methods, are models of a product, a plant, a building or a territory, connected to the data of the physical asset. They allow environmental standards to be written into engineering itself. Limits become design constraints, accounts become data, and key performance indicators are verified as the asset is designed, built and operated, rather than reported years later. China achieves the cascade from planetary limit to individual asset through its administrative hierarchy. Elsewhere, the same cascade can be achieved through common data models and common rules of verification.
The two systems need not share data. Each side keeps its models and data under its own jurisdiction, and what crosses the border are the standards, the indicators and the verified results. The tools cannot settle who pays and who answers for results; only agreements can. But when the parties jointly define the parameters of a virtual twin, meaning the environmental limits, performance indicators and verification rules it encodes, the model becomes a governance tool: a shared digital DNA in which the agreement is written and against which each side’s results are verified. Once the same standards are built into the tools that engineers and planners use every day, convergence happens through practice rather than negotiation. Whoever sets those standards will, in effect, set the rules of production of the transition. This is the real stake of the Copenhagen paradox.
The strongest objection is that the model works only because of China’s hierarchical system of enforcement (Beeson, 2010; Gilley, 2012). The answer has two parts. First, cadre evaluation and Party discipline do not transfer, but integration, staged targets, accounting and standards do, and the EU already practises integration at the smallest scale. The Industrial Emissions Directive assesses air, water, soil, raw materials and energy in a single permit (Directive 2010/75/EU, as amended by Directive (EU) 2024/1785). It is Rio convergence at the level of one installation, and the task is to scale it up to territories and value chains. The transfer can also run the other way. The EU’s integrated permitting, its ecodesign requirements and its experience of emissions trading are methods that China has already drawn on, and can continue to adapt as it builds its own rules for a post-fossil economy. Second, a transfer of methods need not be a zero-sum concession, provided the EU keeps a stake in what it transfers. The new business models of the transition, such as distributed generation, energy as a service, and virtual twins that verify performance over an asset’s life cycle, compete on design, integration and data, not on manufacturing cost alone. The EU can secure its share by controlling the nodal parts of the supply chains: standards and certification, engineering, simulation and lifecycle software, power electronics and grid equipment, and the recycling and processing of critical materials (Draghi, 2024; Regulation (EU) 2024/1252). European firms are among the world’s leaders in industrial simulation and lifecycle software, and a dense layer of small, specialised companies builds on them; the concept of a dynamic digital DNA was developed by one of them, BEAM CUBE, which the author directs. China appears to be moving in the same direction. Its critical-minerals strategy has shifted from reactive resource protection to a system-shaping approach that could support more cooperative global governance (Hu, 2026a). Hu Bin also calls for managed competition on critical minerals, which is the logic of the recycling and traceability pilot proposed below.
The EU is a lawyerly polity that must learn to engineer. It already holds the legal components. The Climate Law requires every proposal to be consistent with its targets (Regulation (EU) 2021/1119). The Effort Sharing and Governance Regulations cascade those targets into national plans (Regulation (EU) 2018/842, as amended; Regulation (EU) 2018/1999). The Nature Restoration Regulation applies the same logic to ecosystems (Regulation (EU) 2024/1991). What the EU lacks is a single integrated objective running through this machinery. The Warsaw Declaration’s call for competitiveness by design points the same way. Adopting one would not require treaty change: the Climate Law was adopted by qualified majority, and unanimity under Article 192(2) TFEU would apply only to the spatial layer, fiscal measures and choices of energy mix. The constraint is political, not legal.
Vulnerability makes action urgent for the EU. Its land and forestry sink absorbed a net 198 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent in 2023, against a 2030 target of 310 (EEA, 2025; Regulation (EU) 2023/839). Yet in October 2025 the European Parliament rejected the forest monitoring law that would have inventoried that stock (European Parliament, 2025). The European Central Bank finds that 72 per cent of euro-area companies depend critically on at least one ecosystem service (Elderson, 2023). It also finds that a 100-year drought would put up to 24 per cent of euro-area output at risk on subnational data, against about 9 per cent on country-level data (Ceglar et al., 2025). The EU is beginning to price a reserve it has declined to inventory. A virtual twin of a territory, resolved at catchment level, could close that gap. It would hold ecosystem accounts built on the UN standard alongside industrial and land-use data, so that what a region declares can be checked against what it measures, with one method in Europe and in China, while the data stay where they are produced.
Four steps from words to deeds
The steps are sequenced. The first actions can be taken before the 2027 SDG Summit with instruments that already exist, because proposals that build on what exists can be implemented more easily than those that require something new. They are not ends in themselves: each builds the record, the method or the trust on which a longer-term objective depends. The joint review prepares agreements on production and investment; a position paper in 2027 prepares an integrated objective for the post-2030 agenda; pilots reporting by 2030 test the method that a binding instrument would then carry; and accounting pilots launched at COP31 prepare common accounting across the three Rio conventions. The horizon is the decade after 2030, in step with China’s Beautiful China milestone of 2035 and the EU’s goal of climate neutrality by 2050.
The first step is to recognise the shared investment. Rebalancing needs a shared balance sheet, and neither side has one. Both sides have already assessed their cooperation, but separately: the European Commission in its country-level evaluation of 2007 and in programme evaluations such as that of the EU–China Environment and Green Economy project (EGEval II, 2007; European Commission, 2021), and China in its 2024 review of China–EU environmental and climate cooperation (Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization Research Centre et al., 2024). A joint review of cooperation since the 1990s, including the programmes of the member states, should bring these accounts together and work like double-entry bookkeeping. One column records what EU cooperation contributed to China: policy design, regulation, training and technology. The other records what China contributed in return: a market and a testing ground for European firms and, later, clean-technology exports that have lowered the cost of the EU’s transition. A third entry records what each side achieved by its own means: for China, domestic investment, learning through manufacturing at scale, dense supplier networks and intense competition; for the EU, regulation, research programmes and carbon pricing. In the near term, the review should begin where it can move fastest, for example as a joint study by ICCSD and EU research partners drawing on national archives and on both sides’ evaluations, and it should be completed before the 2027 SDG Summit, because it sets the footing on which the other steps rest. Once both sides are satisfied with it, the Commission should table it at the EU–China High-Level Environment and Climate Dialogue, where it would set the terms of the next phase: production capacity in Europe, shared standards and joint investment in mitigation and adaptation. A contribution both sides have recorded is one that can be negotiated over; the EU currently negotiates as if its past investment had never been made.
The second is to make integration the EU’s position at the 2027 SDG Summit, in two stages. In the near term, before the September 2027 High-Level Political Forum, the Commission should table a position paper proposing that the agenda after 2030 be given an integrating mechanism, and the Council should endorse its principles in its conclusions on EU priorities. Over the following cycles, that mechanism should become one integrated objective for the post-2030 agenda. Its requirements should be derived from planetary limits and cascaded over time into national and regional targets, each with a verification method and a scheduled revision aligned with the five-yearly Paris global stocktake. The agenda can then learn between cycles, as five-year planning does, instead of waiting fifteen years to discover that it has failed. The EU should propose a mechanism for the existing goals rather than a revised list of goals, and put the method on the table first: the targets can follow in later cycles, but only if the principles are agreed in 2027.
The third is to engineer one system test before negotiating many. Within the EU–China High-Level Environment and Climate Dialogue, the Commission should agree with its Chinese counterparts a small set of paired pilots, linking European innovation ecosystems at subregional scale with Chinese counties or cities. Each pair should apply shared ecosystem accounting and eco-design standards to a real territory, modelled in virtual twins that each side builds and operates under its own law, and exchange verified results rather than raw data. Each pilot should name a responsible institution, a source of financing and measurable outcomes. The pilots should also serve as the first vehicles for joint investment in mitigation and adaptation, and should report within China’s 15th Five-Year Plan cycle, that is, by 2030. Where pilots involve industrial production, they should draw on the lead markets of the Industrial Accelerator Act, under shared low-carbon criteria. Three examples show how near-term pilots can build towards the longer-term objective of shared rules of production.
The first is skills, and it is the most urgent. When CATL and Stellantis broke ground on their €4.1 billion battery plant near Zaragoza in November 2025, around 2,000 workers from China were expected to help build and commission it (electrive, 2025b). By July 2026 the regional government put their number at an average of 1,000 during construction, with a peak of 1,700, while the joint venture planned to train some 4,000 workers from Aragon to run the plant, whose production has slipped to early 2027 (Reuters, 2026). The pattern reflects a real gap: Europe’s workforce does not yet have the process know-how that China built through manufacturing at scale. The Industrial Accelerator Act will attach conditions on local employment and technology transfer to large investments in batteries and electric vehicles, and Beijing has objected. A voluntary skills partnership offers both sides a cooperative way to reach the same result. European regions hosting these plants would be paired with Chinese counterparts, and the plants used as training sites, with regional governments, universities, technical schools and chambers of commerce involved. The natural frame is smart specialisation, whose logic China has taken up, in a different form, in its place-based regional and industrial innovation policy. DG REGIO, DG EMPL and DG RTD, or their successors after the Commission’s ongoing reorganisation, would lead on the EU side with the regions, and the Ministry of Science and Technology with provincial and municipal governments on the Chinese side. Financing would come from the European Social Fund Plus, cohesion funds, Horizon Europe and investors, matched by Chinese national and local programmes. Success would be measured by certified trainees, the share of local staff in technical and management roles against a published timetable, verified environmental results and investment mobilised. In the longer term, these pairs become the territorial nodes in which skills, investment and shared standards meet.
The second is the recycling of critical minerals. Processing is where rivalry is sharpest, and joint processing ventures are unlikely in the near term. Recycling and traceability are different: both sides need them, and neither gains by going it alone. The EU and China should agree common traceability and recycled-content standards and co-develop battery recycling projects in the EU. Projects with producer countries can follow once that base of trust exists, with capacity building pursued alongside the UNFCCC, and so can cooperation on processing in Europe and in producer countries, which is where managed competition would eventually have to reach. The work would be led by DG GROW and DG INTPA and by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Ministry of Commerce. It would be financed through Critical Raw Materials Act projects, Global Gateway, the EIB, Chinese policy banks and multilateral development banks, and measured by recycled content, verified traceability and local jobs.
The third is freight. A pilot to decarbonise the transport of goods across the Eurasian landmass should start with what is technically ready: common emissions accounting for transport chains, building on ISO 14083, and interoperable electronic freight documents, applied first on the Middle Corridor and extended to other routes as circumstances allow. Corridor segments would be modelled in virtual twins to plan electrification and transshipment. Transit countries would join as partners, with their engineers and operators trained alongside. Bilateral work, such as Germany’s existing cooperation with China on decarbonising freight transport, provides a starting point (Climate Cooperation China, n.d.b). Over time, common corridor accounting could become a shared standard for Eurasian trade.
Complementarity should then be turned into standards. Joint standards for storage, metering, interoperability and eco-design would pair China’s scale and speed of deployment with the EU’s strengths in certification, simulation software and power electronics. Grid equipment raises security questions that need separate treatment, so joint grid codes should wait until a framework for those safeguards is in place. In cars, Europe’s strength lies in designing the vehicle as an object, its architecture, safety and integration; China’s lies in batteries, electric drives and vehicle software. Joint engineering already combines the two. Leapmotor’s B10, developed in China, entered series production at Stellantis’s Zaragoza plant in October 2026, with its chassis supplied by a nearby Sino-Spanish joint venture (electrive, 2026). Renault’s Twingo E-Tech was designed in France, had its powertrain engineered at Renault’s development centre in Shanghai and is assembled in Slovenia (electrive, 2025a). The electrical architecture Volkswagen co-developed with Xpeng has been in production in China since the end of 2025, and Volkswagen is considering extending it to its European brands (Car News China, 2026; Híbridos y Eléctricos, 2026). Joint engineering programmes in the EU should build on these partnerships, with terms on intellectual property, staffing and local engineering roles agreed at the outset.
The fourth is to make accounting the interface. Türkiye will launch the Rio Synergies Group for Action at COP31 in Antalya as a voluntary, country-led initiative to make climate, biodiversity and land action more coherent and to reduce reporting burdens. The EU and China should come with a joint offer: pilots in shared ecosystem accounting that simplify reporting across the three conventions rather than add to it. They should be built on SEEA Ecosystem Accounting, resolved at catchment level, and include a reconciliation of the different methods used to measure energy. In the longer term, these pilots can grow into common accounting and reporting across the three conventions. Open to all and anchored in G77 participation, such a coalition could move with or without the United States.
The four steps need a legal anchor, because dialogue alone will not outlast the next political cycle. The second meeting of the EU–China trade and investment consultations, held in Beijing in October 2026, agreed advance notice on export-control listings and scheduled a third meeting for March 2027; it is the immediate channel (Xinhua, 2026c). October also brought the Paris dialogue with which this article opened. The two tracks, trade and climate, still run in separate silos. They should be linked explicitly, so that what is agreed on market access and export licensing is tested against climate commitments, and the reverse. Once the pilots deliver, the sustainable-development commitments they have tested should be carried into a binding instrument, whether a new agreement or, if conditions allow, a revived Comprehensive Agreement on Investment.
Conclusion
In the Pact for the Future, member states invited the High-Level Political Forum to consider, in September 2027, how sustainable development will be advanced by 2030 and beyond (United Nations, 2024). The prevailing expectation is continuity: the goals are kept and their implementation is strengthened. This proposal is consistent with that expectation. It does not replace the goals; it supplies the mechanism they lacked. It also meets the question that Chinese planners are asking: how to take the clean and beautiful world to the world after 2030 and integrate sustainable development effectively into it. Common rules, accounting and standards are the means by which that vision can travel without becoming a single country’s narrative. Finally, it gives the EU a way to rebalance a cooperation that for more than two decades ran largely in one direction: by recognising what each side has given the other, and by turning what was transferred into common rules in which both blocs keep a stake. If short electoral horizons and geopolitical rivalry prevail again, the agenda after 2030 risks becoming one more list of goals. Yet European political economy reaches a similar conclusion by its own route: “short electoral horizons need not doom long-term climate policy”, provided that producers expect stringency to last long enough for their investments to pay off (Edenhofer, Hirt and Genovese, forthcoming). Common rules are one source of that expectation. The architecture must therefore be drafted before September 2027 and tested by 2030. The EU and China have more than two decades of cooperation behind them. The question is whether they treat it as history or as capital.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Corrado Clini, former Italian Minister for the Environment, who as Director General of the Ministry built the Sino-Italian environmental cooperation programme from its start; Wang Jinann, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Honorary President of the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning and head of the World Green Design Organisation. Wang is also a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference; Professor Li Zheng, Dean of ICCSD and Director of Tsinghua’s Laboratory of Low Carbon Energy; Zhang Jian, Executive Vice-President of ICCSD; Hu Bin; as well as the other researchers at ICCSD. The views expressed, and any errors, are the author’s own.
Declaration of interests
The author serves as Senior Adviser to the World Green Design Organization, chaired by Wang Jinnan, who contributed to a commentary by the author (Marieni, 2026). The author is a Visiting Scholar at ICCSD, Tsinghua University, whose Dean Li Zheng, Executive Vice-President Zhang Jian and researchers, including Hu Bin, are discussed, cited or thanked in the text. The author is a Non-Resident Fellow of the Center for China and Globalization (CCG) and Director of Ecological Transition Engineering Solutions at BEAM CUBE, a company that develops virtual twins on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and whose concept of a dynamic digital DNA is mentioned in the text. The author co-authored a cited paper with Corrado Clini (Marieni and Clini, 2019). AI-assisted tools were used for language editing and reference checking; the author takes full responsibility for the content and any errors.
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Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization Research Centre, National Energy Conservation Center, Xinhua Institute and Institutes of Science and Development, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2024) 《中欧环境与气候合作：进展与展望》 [China–EU Environmental and Climate Cooperation: Progress and Prospects]. Beijing, 3 May. Available from: https://www.mee.gov.cn/ywdt/hjywnews/202405/W020240507328914691615.pdf
Xinhua (Luo Yu) (2026a) ‘第八届”巴黎协定之友”高级别对话聚焦多边气候治理’ [The eighth Friends of the Paris Agreement High-Level Dialogue focuses on multilateral climate governance], Paris, 20 October.
Xinhua (Luo Yu) (2026b) ‘综述｜中方专家呼吁深化中欧合作推动全球气候治理’ [Chinese experts call for deeper China–EU cooperation to advance global climate governance], Paris, 22 October.
Xinhua (2026c) ‘China, EU agree to keep bilateral trade ties stable, hold next meeting in March 2027’, Beijing, 9 October. Available from: https://english.news.cn/20261010/36872ccd35594c99addb704ed3e27070/c.html
Zhang, Y. (2023) ‘Reshaping the relationship between environment and development: a theoretical framework under the paradigm of eco-civilization and its policy implications’, Social Sciences in China, 44(1).
Zhang, Y., Chao, Q., Chen, Y., Zhang, J., Wang, M., Zhang, Y. and Yu, X. (2021) ‘China’s carbon neutrality: leading global climate governance and green transformation’, Chinese Journal of Urban and Environmental Studies, 9(3), pp. 1–22.
Legislation
Directive 2010/75/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 November 2010 on industrial emissions, as amended by Directive (EU) 2024/1785 of 24 April 2024.
Regulation (EU) 2018/842 of 30 May 2018 (Effort Sharing Regulation), as amended by Regulation (EU) 2023/857 of 19 April 2023.
Regulation (EU) 2018/1999 of 11 December 2018 on the Governance of the Energy Union and Climate Action.
Regulation (EU) 2021/1119 of 30 June 2021 establishing the framework for achieving climate neutrality (European Climate Law).
Regulation (EU) 2023/839 of 19 April 2023 amending Regulation (EU) 2018/841 (LULUCF).
Regulation (EU) 2024/1252 of 11 April 2024 establishing a framework for ensuring a secure and sustainable supply of critical raw materials (Critical Raw Materials Act).
Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 of 13 June 2024 establishing a framework for the setting of ecodesign requirements for sustainable products.
Regulation (EU) 2024/1991 of 24 June 2024 on nature restoration.
Much of the literature on EU–China climate relations has traced how single instruments, above all emissions trading, spread from Europe to China and how they affect competitiveness, and has found that domestic drivers shaped what China adopted (Torney, 2015). The debate on climate clubs asks how trade rules can enforce shared goals (Nordhaus, 2015). Less attention has gone to how cooperation works on the ground, and to how the two blocs could jointly build a mechanism that integrates climate, nature and production, and so turn shared goals into shared rules of production. The analysis draws on policy and planning documents from both sides, on the Chinese technical literature, and on my own involvement in EU–China environmental cooperation since 2001. It also draws on written comments on a draft of this article from participants in the Chinese process. These relationships are set out in the declaration of interests.
The Copenhagen paradox is a contradiction that the climate negotiations have carried forward since the earliest COPs: agreement on the goals, and conflict over the rules of production, competition, cost, and access to resources meant to deliver them (Torney, 2015; Oberthür and Dupont, 2021). Europe and China converge on the physics but diverge on who manufactures the escape (European Commission and High Representative, 2019; Draghi, 2024; European Commission, 2025a, 2025b). The name recalls COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, where leaders recognised the 2°C goal but could not agree on the rules to reach it.