Future of Green and Low-carbon Technology

The National Conference on Ecological and Environmental Protection emphasized: "We must strengthen scientific and technological support, and promote self-reliance and self-improvement in green and low-carbon technologies." Currently, China's ecological civilization construction is facing both opportunities and challenges, and there is a practical demand for realizing self-reliance and self-improvement in green and low-carbon technologies.

The remarkable achievements China has made in ecological civilization construction cannot be separated from the strong support of the innovation and development of green and low-carbon technologies. At the same time, ecological civilization construction still faces many challenges: the industrial structure is still overly heavy, energy demand will maintain rigid growth, the foundation for steady improvement of ecological and environmental quality is not yet solid, and the superposition of old and new pollutants has become a difficulty for the continuous improvement of environmental quality. Frequent extreme weather events have brought new challenges to national ecological environment security and the security of comprehensive green transition. This requires us to strengthen the support of green and low-carbon scientific and technological innovation for ecological civilization construction, and solve new problems with new ideas and new technologies on the new journey.

Green development is an inevitable requirement for ecological civilization construction and represents the current direction of change in science, technology and industries. Green and low-carbon technologies should themselves be green and low-carbon in technology, capable of promoting ecological environmental protection and energy conservation, emission reduction and carbon reduction. At the same time, they are also guiding and disruptive technologies that can promote the transformation of traditional industries to green, circular and low-carbon directions, and the transformation of traditional productivity to new quality productivity. Practice has proven that core key technologies cannot be obtained through begging, buying, or lobbying. To achieve self-reliance and self-improvement in green and low-carbon technologies, we must ensure safe development and tackle core key technologies, and we cannot be constrained by others in key technologies. With green and low carbon as the goal and innovation as the driving force for development, making green a universal form and making transition safer, can we grasp the path, method, pace, intensity and initiative of ecological civilization construction and the realization of the "double carbon" goal. To promote self-reliance and self-improvement in green and low-carbon technologies, the author puts forward the following suggestions.

Self-reliance and self-improvement of talents is the foundation of self-reliance and self-improvement in science and technology. Scientific and technological self-improvement starts with talent self-improvement, and cultivating strategic talents is the key. Innovation-driven development is essentially talent-driven, and strategic talent resources should be placed in a priority position. Realizing self-reliance and self-improvement in green and low-carbon technologies has put forward higher requirements for the construction of scientific and technological talents and high-skilled talent teams. We should independently cultivate strategic talents with an international vision of the frontiers of science and technology, who can put forward new theories, open up new fields and explore new paths in accordance with the urgent and long-term needs of national development. We should speed up the cultivation of new types of workers in the field of green and low-carbon technologies, so that they can become the most active and creative factors in the new quality productivity, with higher education levels and labor skills, more advanced values and the ability to innovate and tackle key problems.

Focus on original innovation from the source and strengthen basic research on green and low-carbon technologies. Solving key technical problems from the source and the underlying level is the fundamental requirement for self-reliance and self-improvement in green and low-carbon technologies. Starting from the strategic layout of national and social development, industrial needs and practical applications, we should carry out systematic research focusing on major basic scientific issues. We will continue to explore the law of interaction between human and nature, and strengthen research on integrated protection and systematic governance around improving the diversity and stability of ecosystems. Focus on ecological

system major theories, climate change and greenhouse gases, the generation and emission management of new pollutants, carry out basic theoretical research on their environmental hazards and the mechanism of action on human health, to support systematic integrated innovation. Technical standards play a guiding, fundamental role, which is very important for strengthening basic research on green and low-carbon technologies. We should speed up the research on the theoretical system of ecological and environmental technical standards oriented to carbon reduction, pollution reduction, green expansion and growth.

Promote interdisciplinary integration and collaboration, and solve "bottleneck" technical problems with the progress of basic research. Interdisciplinary integration and collaboration is the key to solving the "bottleneck" technical problems in the green and low-carbon field. With the continuous advancement of ecological civilization construction and the tough battle against pollution, problems such as the great difficulty in managing complex ecological and environmental problems, scattered interdisciplinary scientific research forces, and insufficient scientific and technological support for key issues have become increasingly prominent. It is necessary to systematically identify "bottleneck" technical problems in the green and low-carbon field, and make breakthroughs in innovative technologies in such fields as ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss, technology development for climate change response, compound pollution of "water-soil-air-solid" and collaborative emission reduction of multiple pollutants, monitoring, early warning and treatment of new pollutants, ocean heat and acidification, nuclear and radiation safety, and development of low-carbon, zero-carbon and negative-carbon technologies for industries. We will accelerate the transformation of scientific and technological achievements, strengthen the construction of green and smart digital ecological civilization, build a smart digital twin system of ecological environment that integrates ecological environment data and governance system, and build a modern environmental governance system with coordinated "science and technology - governance - management" from the monitoring end to the decision-making end, from accurate correlation source tracing analysis to accurate prediction, from pre-judgment overall planning to scientific decision-making, so as to form a large-scale high-efficiency simulation and smart body of the ecological environment.

Enhance China's voice and influence in the global environmental governance system. Upholding the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind, we will tell the grand narrative of building a beautiful China well on the international stage, and participate in global climate negotiation agenda and international rule-setting with a more positive attitude. The key is to grasp the trend of global climate governance, realize the transformation from a participant to a guide in global ecological environment governance, and enable the international community to fully recognize the active measures China has taken and the effective results achieved in ecological environmental protection and climate governance. We will actively participate in the formulation of international rules, especially in the field of ESG construction, establish carbon footprint data disclosure rules for green supply chains, build a high-quality localized full life cycle assessment carbon footprint database, and achieve international mutual recognition.

Innovate the allocation of factors, and stimulate new green drivers through self-reliance and self-improvement in green and low-carbon technologies. China's ecological and environmental governance has gradually shifted from tough pollution prevention and control to supporting the construction of a beautiful China and the realization of the "double carbon" goal, and from single environmental factor governance to comprehensive governance featuring cross-field, multi-factor, system coordination and process collaboration. On the one hand, we guide the green and safe transformation of traditional industries with scientific and technological innovation, and promote the green and low-carbon upgrading and transformation of traditional industries through ecological environmental protection, pollution control, and the "dual control" of carbon emissions. On the other hand, we need to accelerate the development of green strategic emerging industries and future industries. Through strategic, cutting-edge and disruptive scientific and technological innovation and application promotion, we will build a modern green, low-carbon and circular industrial system, coordinate the expansion of emerging industries and the upgrading of traditional industries, implement a number of major demonstration projects with national roles and cross-regional influence, and expand the paths for realizing the value of ecological products. The all-round green transformation of production and lifestyle, way of thinking and values is also an important aspect of self-reliance and self-improvement in green and low-carbon technologies. We should not only pay attention to innovation at the technical and business format level, but also pay attention to innovation at the management and institutional mechanism level, and continuously improve the level of green and low-carbon scientific and technological innovation.