Low Carbon Zones

Low Carbon Zones (LCZs) are way to innovate large scale governance and regulation for low carbon economies. Pioneered in China, and inspired by the “Special Economic Zones” established in the 1980’s, the initial group of Low Carbon Zones of 10 provinces and 3 cities covered 350 million people. LCZs were subsequently extended to smaller towns across China.

Low Carbon Zones emerged from an EU-China research project designed by Nick Mabey and led by Bernice Lee involving Chatham House, E3G, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Energy Research Institute. Detailed in the 2007 report “Changing Climates” LCZs were proposed as a practical way for China to develop different economic & governance models of decarbonisation suitable for a range of different regions; from the developed East coast to heavy industry dominated Western regions.

Before being adopted by the Chinese government, pilot projects on LCZ implementation were carried out at provincial scale in Jilin City (led by Chatham House), Chongqing and Guangdong and at industrial zone scale led by E3G.

Low Carbon Zones were also intended to be a way of structuring EU-China collaboration on decarbonisation; aligning trade and investment incentives with focused cooperation and replacing fragmented project-level approaches. Nick Mabey led E3G’s work with an informal group of European countries to develop and promote the LCZ cooperation framework. Unfortunately broader political and trade issues between the EU and China prevented concerted LCZ regional cooperation approaches being established.

Regional and place-based approaches remain an important element of E3G’s work in driving large scale market and regulatory innovation including pioneering new energy zones in the UK and across Europe, and working at a regional scale on just transition and resilience.