Regulatory Features and Institutional Construction of the Carbon Neutrality Implementation Act

On the issue of national legislation on climate change, there are two options in China, namely the “Law on Responding to Climate Change” and the “Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutral Law”. Based on China’s actual situation and foreign experience, the Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutral Law, which can better achieve the goals of carbon emission reduction, green and low-carbon development and the value rationality of just transition, is a more necessary and feasible choice. It shall be legislatively designated as the Carbon Neutrality Implementation Act, with this title constituting its statutory nomenclature. The Carbon Neutrality Implementation Act embodies pluralistic legislative regulatory features: the hierarchical objectives of direct, indirect and long-term goals, and presents the multiple functions of specialized regulation, synergistic regulation and accountability regulation, as well as the normative expression of different effects determined by the regulatory content. In constructing the institutional system of the Carbon Neutrality Implementation Act, its legislative regulatory features should be transformed into a legislative expression programme for the legal system. That is, formulating the specialised legal regime for goal orientation, process control and evaluation of results, and fair transition safeguards, and the chimeric legal regime for project carbon evaluation, realization of the value of ecological products from carbon sinks, and safeguarding funds for the green and low-carbon transition, as well as the consequentialist legal regime.