Zach Mills

szdaily@126.com

THE 2025 Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutrality Forum and Shenzhen National Low-Carbon City Forum, held last week at the Shenzhen International Low Carbon City in Longgang District, convened a formidable assembly of Chinese policymakers, leading scientists and engineers, and international experts to address one of the most complex challenges of our time.

Framed around the central theme of “AI Empowering Urban Green Development,” the event was designed not merely to showcase Shenzhen’s achievements, but to “gather global wisdom” and “inject surging momentum” into the urban green transition.

Over two days of intensive speeches and dialogues, a powerful narrative emerged. The forum detailed Shenzhen’s pioneering domestic model for decarbonization, explored the critical technologies — from national grids to advanced materials — that underpin this transition, and culminated in a unified call from global leaders for the international standards and collaboration required to scale local successes into a global solution.

Forging Shenzhen’s green blueprint

The forum’s opening sessions articulated a clear, top-down “policy stack,” demonstrating how China’s national “Dual Carbon” goals are translated into provincial governance and executed through Shenzhen’s pioneer projects.

At the provincial level, Qin Liming, deputy director of the Guangdong Provincial Development and Reform Commission, outlined a strategy anchored in digital governance. He highlighted the creation of the Guangdong Carbon Cloud (Yue Tan Yun), a first-in-the-country smart platform for the comprehensive “measuring, calculating, observing, and controlling” of carbon emissions.

This tool, Qin explained, is key to the province’s shift from managing energy consumption to managing carbon emissions, providing the data-driven foundation that has helped the new energy sector become Guangdong’s ninth industry to surpass 1 trillion yuan (US$140 billion) in annual value.

If Guangdong provided the strategy, Shenzhen provides the proof. Zhang Hua, vice mayor of Shenzhen, positioned the city as the nation’s primary “pioneer” and “innovative city.” In other words, Shenzhen is a living laboratory where policy becomes practice. She cataloged a series of tangible, high-tech achievements, including the construction of a “world-class super-charging city” and a “globally leading green building cluster.”

Zhang noted that the city leverages its homegrown AI leaders like Huawei and Tencent to pioneer the development of smart grids and intelligent connected vehicles. This strategy proves that a green transition can be a powerful engine for economic vitality. Simultaneously, it creates a desirable urban environment — a fact evidenced by the city’s 1,300 parks and best-in-class air quality.

This model is explicitly designed for export. Xu Yunfei, a deputy director at both the Shenzhen Development and Reform Commission and the city’s Greater Bay Area Office, presented the “2025 Shenzhen Green Low-Carbon Development White Paper,” a playbook based on the city’s successes.

Structured around four pillars — “reducing carbon [emissions], reducing pollution, expanding green, and promoting growth” — the paper includes 100 examples of green, low carbon development with the stated goal of “providing a reference for sister cities.” These cases exemplify Shenzhen’s role as a national leader in creating a replicable blueprint for other cities.

The AI engine:

Technology at every scale

While policy sets the direction, the forum’s technical keynotes revealed that technology, with AI as its universal enabler, provides the power. A crucial duality emerged: a national energy strategy operating at the macro scale and a “frontier” urban innovation agenda addressing cities — the main source of emissions.

Speaking on the broader domestic context over a long timescale, Tang Guangfu, director of the Huairou National Laboratory, delivered a sober assessment of China’s energy challenges. For one, China’s total energy demand is and will remain large, given the country’s size and the fact that its GDP growth is not yet decoupled from energy use. On the supply side, China is rich in coal but poor in oil and gas. At the same time, renewables are available, but they are in the western and northern regions and prone to fluctuation and interruption.

Given these constraints and the imperative of carbon neutrality, Tang said China’s future energy system should maximize renewables as the dominant source of energy while employing other energy sources. His blueprint includes a massive build-out of renewables, the energy from which would be transmitted by ultra-high voltage power lines and a new generation of smart grids, and a build-up of flexible energy sources, such as energy storage, hydrogen, and flexible coal-fired power, to address the fluctuations inherent to renewables.

Tang also provided an overview of key technologies being researched, such as advanced renewable energy (offshore wind & new photovoltaics), flexible coal power with CCUS, new power grid systems, and digitalization and AI for grid management.

Cheng Huiming — director and principal researcher at the Institute of Carbon Neutrality Technology, the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences — focused on carbon neutrality at the urban level. He argued that cities are critical as they account for more than 70% of carbon emissions in the world and about 85% in China.

His presentation showcased a portfolio of Shenzhen-led innovations: developing direct seawater electrolysis to create green hydrogen; engineering wide-temperature-range batteries that function from -70°C to 80°C; and advancing flexible perovskite solar cells for building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV).

Linking directly to the forum’s theme, Cheng emphasized that AI, if integrated in power grid management, would quickly produce substantial efficiency gains. He also emphasized the role of AI-assisted R&D in accelerating materials discovery, using machine learning to create the foundational components of the next energy revolution.

This focus on the building blocks of sustainability was applied to the building sector by René Sigg, senior advisor at Intep-Integrated Planning LLC. He described the future of circular construction as designing buildings not as disposable structures, but as “material banks.” In this model, every component, from façade panels to interior fittings, is tracked via a “material passport,” ensuring it can be “reused, repurposed, or recycled at the end of its life.”

This complex lifecycle management, Sigg explained, is made possible by sophisticated digital tools. “Digitalization is transforming how we conceive, build, and operate buildings,” he noted, explaining that “tools such as AI and digital twins allow us to simulate and optimize performance long before construction begins,” ultimately creating spaces that are not only efficient but enhance the well-being of the people inside.

This vision was echoed by international experts like Laura Van Wie McGrory, global engagement lead of the World Resources Institute (WRI) Polsky Center, who highlighted two key areas for technological collaboration. First, she pointed to Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology, where EV fleets (and buses) act as “energy hubs” to stabilize the grid. In a clear nod to the city’s progress, she explicitly cited Shenzhen as “an excellent example” and a global leader in V2G deployment, demonstrating a clear opportunity for shared learning.

Second, she introduced the emerging solution of “advanced conductors,” which replace the steel core of existing transmission lines with a lighter carbon composite. This technology, she explained, has the potential to double the grid’s capacity more quickly and at a fraction of the cost — five to 10 times more cheaply than building new transmission lines — providing a powerful tool for cities and nations struggling with aging infrastructure and rising energy demand.

Scaling success: The call for global standards

The forum’s international contingent delivered a unified and powerful message: technology and local ambition are no longer the primary bottlenecks. The most significant barrier to a global green transition is a “consensus crisis” — a lack of the shared standards, policies, and financial rules needed to build trust and unlock investment at scale.

Tatiana Schmollack-Tarasova, managing director of the British Standards Institution (BSI) China, framed this challenge most starkly, warning of a “growing maze of different frameworks and reporting requirements” that creates confusion and stalls investment. The antidote, she argued, is trust. “Without trust,” she stated, “we cannot scale success.”

The solution, she argued, is consensus-driven international standards, such as the upcoming ISO standard for Net Zero. She challenged China to take the data from its “living laboratories” like Shenzhen and bring it to global platforms like ISO to help build this essential consensus. For companies lost in the “maze,” her advice was pragmatic: use a “double materiality” principle to focus on the ESG criteria that are most critical both financially and environmentally.

This call for shared rules was powerfully reinforced. Riccardo Mesiano, a senior official at the U.N.’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), identified a primary barrier as the tendency for governments to treat climate policy as a “separate agenda.” To be effective, he argued, climate goals must be integrated directly into macroeconomic frameworks and industrial policy.

Prof. Vilas Nitivattananon of the Asian Institute of Technology provided a crucial nuance, praising Shenzhen as an excellent model for mega-cities but cautioning that its high-tech, top-down approach must be adapted, not simply copied, for smaller cities that require more “bottom-up” engagement. This underscores the need for a collaborative approach based on shared learning, not just one-way instruction.

The forum’s ultimate message was that collaboration is the only path forward, a point articulated by Janneke de Vries, director of EU partnerships at the WRI. In an era of “geopolitical tensions and fragmented supply chains,” she argued that cooperation on climate and green industry can serve as a crucial “stabilizing bridge.” She pointed specifically to the EU-China Common Ground Taxonomy for sustainable finance as a prime example of this principle in action.

By creating a shared definition of “what counts as genuinely green,” the taxonomy gives investors and companies a “clearer view” and builds confidence and stability in the market. This coordinated policy, de Vries explained, allows the two major economic blocs to actively “reduce uncertainty for global markets,” proving that even in a complex world, shared green standards are not just an environmental goal, but a powerful tool for ensuring global economic stability and progress.

The path forward:

Forging consensus

The 2025 Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutrality Forum did more than just celebrate progress — it signaled a crucial inflection point. It made clear that the technical challenges of the green transition are rapidly being met with an arsenal of solutions powered by AI and frontier science. The new, more urgent challenge is one of governance and trust.

Shenzhen has successfully positioned itself as a world leader in demonstrating what is technologically possible. The city’s open invitation to the world, however, shows a keen understanding that its own success is intrinsically linked to the creation of a global system of shared rules.

As speaker after speaker affirmed, from green shipping corridors between Asia and the U.S. to common financial standards between Europe and China, collaboration is not just an ideal, but an economic and environmental non-negotiable. The forum’s ultimate message is that the blueprint has been drawn — the time has come to build the global consensus needed to construct a sustainable future, together.