Global Agriculture

COP26 Report: UK-China Tech Collaboration to Unfold the AgriFuture

14 November 2021, China: From extreme heat and drought to erratic rainfalls and worsening hunger, climate change is accelerating to bring irreversible harm to our planet. The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), held from 31 October to 12 November in Glasgow, UK, is striving to hammer out an agreement on what nations will do together to combat global warming—and how. The COP26 aims to drive actions towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention.

To explore the themes of COP26 and investigate the role that Chinese and British businesses can play in combating climate change, the China-Britain Business Council (CBBC) has launched its Targeting Net Zero report on 10 November.

This report focuses on five key themes – Energy Transition, Adaption & Resilience, Clean Transportation, Green Finance, and Nature, which dives deep on innovating ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across a whole host of sectors and industries. Amongst the China-UK collaboration case studies are companies that include London Stock Exchange, CGN, BYD, Alexander Dennis, China Resources Power, XAG, Wood Plc, Huawei, Met Office, and HSBC.

As one of the cases in the Adaptation & Resilience chapter, XAG tells the story about unfolding the future of agriculture with low-carbon farm robots. Since 2018, XAG has been collaborating with its UK partners to introduce drones and robots to help farmers cultivate their crops with less Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and chemical sprays.

Next, with the global launch of XAG flagship agricultural drones – V40 and P40, the plan is to spearhead a campaign scaling up the use of autonomous drones and robots to provoke a fundamental change towards Net Zero farming.