This week Ivan Vejvoda is in conversation with the director of the Asia programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations Janka Oertel. Against a backdrop of rising global temperatures and the pledges made at the COP 26 summit in Glasgow last year, Oertel and Vejvoda consider the pivotal role that China will play in determining whether humanity can achieve its stated aim and keep warming below 1.5 degrees. Conventional wisdom sees the rise in emissions that has accompanied China's emergence as an economic superpower as a forbidding hurdle, but emissions have fallen recently and the country's commitment to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 took many by surprise. What does the arrival of the Chinese epoch mean for Europe and the planet?
In addition to her role at the ECFR, Janka Oertel is a Europe's Futures fellow at the IWM this year, has been a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ Berlin office and was a program director at the Körber Foundation. She has published widely on topics related to EU-China relations, US-China relations, security in the Asia-Pacific region, Chinese foreign policy, 5G and emerging technologies as well as climate cooperation.
Read more about the Europe's Futures Program
Information about Janka Oertel's fellowship is available on our website