Editorial

Abstract

It is an honour to have the opportunity to speak to the readers of Strategic Planning for Energy and Environment Journal on the occasion of the first issue of 2024. We hope that our future contributions will effectively address new and complex topics at the core of one great challenge: the fight against climate change.

This foreword is a brief exploration of recent fundamental milestones: agreed policies aiming to reduce our impact on the environmental system. It is a journey across several nations, all united by a common destiny. At the moment of writing this foreword, November 2023, the US and China have recently published a fundamental agreement in the roadmap towards net-zero. China and the United States “recognize that the climate crisis has affected more and more countries around the world.” A reaffirma- tion of the joint declarations of April and November 2021, practically picking up where diplomacy between the two countries left off in 2022 after Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in that year. Xi Jinping has defined US and China as having “the most important bilateral relationship in the world.”

The two countries stated that they remain committed to the implemen- tation of the Paris Agreement and related decisions, including the Glasgow Climate Pact and the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan. Both countries support efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030. They have thus expressed their intention to advance the deployment of renewable energy in their respective economies “so as to accelerate the substitution of coal, oil and gas production, and thus anticipate a significant reduction in absolute energy sector emissions”.