China’s 15th Five Year Plan set a target in March 2026 to build 100 national level zero-carbon industrial parks – zones for industrial production with net-zero or close to zero carbon emissions. This move marked an upgrade to what had previously been a series of pilot projects around the country and catapulted such zones to a national priority.
Industrial parks and special economic zones (SEZs) are considered by economists and policymakers to be a central tool in economic development, and have been important features of the economic policies in China and many developing countries.
China’s net-zero industrial parks
In China, a highly industrialised country, industrial parks have been estimated to account for nearly a third of the country’s emissions. The zero-carbon target for industrial parks would be an important step in accelerating and deepening China’s decarbonisation, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors such as steel, cement and chemicals, which often cluster in industrial parks.
The history of low- and zero-carbon industrial parks in China stretches back to at least the 11th Five Year Plan (2006-2010) when China began building so-called “pilot ecological industrial parks”. Some researchers trace the history even further back to 2001, when the first “eco-industrial park” – a sugar processing complex with circular economy features – was established in south-west China’s Guangxi province.
During the 14th Five Year Plan (2021-25), China released its “1+N” climate policy framework, which explicitly promoted the development of “green and low-carbon industrial parks” and “near-zero carbon emission demonstration projects”. This marked the “systematisation and scaling up” of emission reductions, notes a paper by Liu Jingning and Yang Li, researchers from Beijing-based environmental think-tank iGDP.
By 2024, the term “zero-carbon parks” appeared in central government documents, and by March 2026 it had made its way into the 15th Five Year Plan. At the end of 2025, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) published a list of 52 national-level zero-carbon industrial parks to be built before 2030.
Chinese policymakers have been clear that the basic principle of a “zero-carbon industrial park” is that it should have net zero or close to zero carbon emissions from its operations.
However, in practice China’s zero-carbon industrial zones have developed in different directions across the country, according to provinces’ economic strengths and policy priorities. One of the main challenges now, in the 15th Five Year Plan period, is to unify standards and carbon accounting and certification systems.
China’s overseas industrial parks
China is by far the home location for the world’s industrial parks and SEZs – nearly half of the world’s 5,383 industrial parks and SEZs are in the country. Increasingly however, Chinese companies are also investing in industrial parks overseas, with nearly half of these based in Southeast Asia (45%), and the rest mostly in Africa (28%) or Europe (25%). A notable feature of China’s existing overseas industrial parks is that the majority are located in areas with rich solar resources.
Research indicates that there is potential for nearly 420GW of solar PV capacity and over 116GW of wind power capacity. in these parks. This could avoid 340 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, equivalent to more than the UK’s annual emissions as of 2024.
From a decarbonisation perspective, transition of electricity generation to renewable and low-carbon sources can deliver substantial and immediate emissions reductions for many developing countries of the Global South.
One key lesson these countries could learn from China is to think about low and zero carbon industrial zones’ return to the economy as a whole, rather than returns on a project-by-project basis. This involves understanding the broader returns in terms of competitiveness and industrial upgrading as well as environmental outcomes – and the need to make this a national priority.
Source: [Edited from] Dialogue Earth, July 31, 2026. https://dialogue.earth/en/energy/can-chinas-zero-carbon-industrial-parks-go-global/
