Climate Change and Clean Energy in the EU-China Perspective: Cooperation and Competition

The concept of sustainable development, one of the key words of the last few decades' discourse on growth, reached China in the middle of the huge reforms that placed the country at the core of the world globalizations dynamics. The keys themes of Chinese's Government issues are rebalancing the economy and protecting the environment. These plans are part of the wide process of global integration that, on one hand induced a progressive reform of the Chinese environmental law system and, on the other hand, led China to adopt a major position in the international rule making arena in the field of environmental protection. In this context, a complex process of dialogue with the European Union has been developed. The relations between the two economic powers is becoming more and more crucial as far as environmental protection is concerned. The Clean Development Mechanism is a fundamental part of the cooperation programs in the environmental sector between EU and China. The study aims at analyzing the existing cooperation programs between the EU and China in the field of environmental protection, with particular attention to legal cooperation at its achievements, as far as the modernization of Chinese's legal system is concerned.