World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) launched its two-year energy saving campaign, "20 Ways to 20 Percent" in China last weekend after the country flunked the first test to meet its ambitious energy-saving goal in the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-11).

The goal was to reduce energy consumption per unit of gross domestic products (GDP) by 20 percent in five years, or 4 percent a year. 

WWF's 20 tips aimed at helping China achieve its goal, and include use of energy-saving air conditioners, refrigerators, electric bulbs and tubes and washing machines, unplugging household appliances when they are not in use, making paperless business a reality and using more public transport.

"If all of China's 1.3 billion people follow the 20 tips, they can save 300 million tons of coal," WWF's Global Climate Change Program Director Hans Verolme said yesterday. "That's 10 percent of China's total annual energy consumption."

To help people understand what they could do in their daily life to save energy, WWF offered the 20 tips to schoolchildren in a puzzle. The idea was to send a message to the public that saving energy was as simple as "child's play."

For instance, unplugging of household appliances may occur to be too simple an act to save energy.

But the WWF's director of Global Climate Change Program in China, Chen Dongmei, said: "If every Chinese does that, 18 billion kilowatt-hours of power can be saved in just one year, more than the annual power generation by three Dayawan nuclear plants in Guangdong."

As a developing country with the largest population in the world, China is seen as a key energy-saving player across the world, especially when 96 percent carbon dioxide emissions are related to energy consumption.

The energy consumed by urban dwellers accounts for 25 percent of the country's total today.

"Through various activities, we hope that more and more people will be involved in saving energy on their own, which ultimately will help the country achieve its energy-saving target and ease environmental problems caused by climate change," said WWF's China representative Dermot O'Gorman.

(China Daily January 25, 2007)