As diplomats and leaders met in Rio de Janeiro for the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the world had enough evidence to know that economic growth was taking its toll on the planet, and that the benefits of growth were very unevenly distributed. It also knew that dependence on fossil fuels to deliver most of those unevenly distributed benefits (registered as annual gross domestic product [GDP] growth) was resulting in dangerous concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere. Fast-forward almost two decades and little has changed. A staggering amount of information, reports, renewed commitments and a regularly rediscovered urgency with which environmental ‘crises’ ought to be addressed, characterised the 1990s and the first decade of this century like a relentless, yet muffled, beat. Climate change is emblematic of the extent of our impact, the urgent need for a response and the seemingly endless postponement of action. Although it is but the final symptom of a long chain of effects caused by humanity's ‘continuing transformation of the earth’ (Schellnhuber et al, 2005, p 13) in its pursuit of prosperity (see Nellemann and Corcoran, 2010), climate change stands out as the issue that best illustrates our interdependence, not just between nations but also among all species and habitats on whose services humans ‘fundamentally depend’ (MEA, 2005, p v).

Against this backdrop, China has rapidly taken centre stage, at once as ‘victim’ of historical transformation and pollution of the biosphere by developed nations, and as ‘perpetrator’ – as it steals the title of ‘first polluter’ from the United States (US) (Bina and Soromenho-Marques, 2008). By virtue of its sheer size and growth trajectory, China appears to have focused the minds of leaders across the world on the physical limits of our planet and on the challenge of having to share common resources with a growing population, in ways that predictions of the Earth's limitations, such as The limits to growth (Meadows et al, 1972), Our common future (WCED, 1987), Agenda 21 (UNCED, 1992) and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA, 2005), have frustratingly failed to do. Economic growth and the environment have never looked quite so in conflict as in the case of China.