A new report by Australia’s Climate Commission says that China is one of the world’s bright spots in global action to curb the effects of climate change.
Though China remains the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, the report, The Critical Decade: global action building on climate change, found that in 2012 China reduced the carbon intensity of its economy more than expected and almost halved the rate of growth for electricity demand.
Authorities in Vietnam’s southern Dong Nai Province have asked the country’s National Assembly to reject the two proposed hydro-power projects, Dong Nai 6 and Dong Nai 6A, because of environmental risks.
There has been continuing controversy for two years over the Dong Nai 6 and Dong Nai 6A dam proposals due to their potentially serious environmental impact.
"Residents along Dong Nai River, including those in Ho Chi Minh City, would suffer an unimaginable disaster if the reservoirs of these hydro-power plants broke," said Tran Van Tu, chairman of Dong Nai People's Council, who also heads the group of National Assembly deputies from Dong Nai Province.
Asia Pacific has surpassed the rest of the world in its consumption of materials and will continue to dominate world material flows, according to a new UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report released today.
The region’s trade balance indicates that the current rate of exploitation of its resource base is no longer sufficient to support the region’s fast-growing economies and changing lifestyles. From 1970-2008, consumption of construction minerals increased 13.4 times, metal ores and industrial minerals consumption 8.6, fossil fuels 5.4, and biomass 2.7 times.
Draft guidelines from Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) show India’s central government is prepared to offer subsidies of up to 30 percent on new solar plants, totaling 750-MW of capacity, to be built under Phase-II, Batch-1 of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM).
This is the first time such extensive direct grants, made under a “Viability Gap Funding” (VGF) scheme, have been offered to India’s solar power industry. The government, which has previously used the funding model to build roads, railways and coal-fired power plants, is seeking to boost renewable-energy output to curb chronic blackouts that shave an estimated 1.2 percentage points off annual economic growth.
Despite last week’s bleak assessment by the International Energy Agency that investment in clean energy has come to a virtual stand-still, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has produced a new report predicting that investments in renewables will triple by 2030 and further erode the dominance fossil fuel has on the world’s energy supply.
According to BNEF the continued free fall of costs for wind and solar that has wiped out the balance sheets of dozens of clean tech manufacturers will lead to a new splurge of investments.
The massive hydroelectric dam building program in Southwest China may have a causal link to the magnitude-7 earthquake that rocked Lushan, in China’s Sichuan province on Saturday, killing 179 and leaving thousands injured and homeless.
The April 20 earthquake occurred along the same Longmenshan Fault Belt as the magnitude-8 tremor that killed more than 80,000 people in Sichuan five years ago. According to Fan Xiao, a geologist and chief engineer of the Regional Geological Survey Team of the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau, the latest quake is likely to have been part of a stress adjustment process, making the region more dangerous after the Wenchuan quake.
India is doubling spending on water management as part of government efforts to ease constraints on economic growth. At the moment the country treats only 20 percent of its sewage and has now turned on the financial taps as the inadequate supply of clean water is threatening to stunt growth in industrial and farm output.
India has 18 percent of the world’s population and four percent of the globe’s water resources, about 80 percent of which is used for farming and less than 10 percent for all industry sectors. Water availability per person in India dropped by 15 percent in a decade to 1,545 cubic liters, according to the country’s 2011 census.
In addition to being hit with the same industry woes that all global solar manufacturers have had to contend with, including over-supply and collapsing prices, China’s LDK Solar is now watching sales tumble as customers desert the troubled wafer and module supplier.
Even as the company struggles to avoid the fate of its now bankrupt rival Suntech, LDK yesterday reported net loss of USD517 million for the quarter ending 31 December 2012. But what be even more telling is that its USD135.9 million in revenues for the final quarter of 2012 are only slightly half the USD230 million it predicted when it released its third quarter results at the end of last year.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has announced his government’s intention to double the country’s non-hydro renewable energy generating capacity by 2017.
"It is proposed to double the renewable energy capacity in our country from 25,000-MW in 2012 to 55,000-megawatts by the year 2017," Singh told the two-day Clean Energy Ministerial conference in New Delhi.
He said India that ramping up its use of wind, solar and biomass energies in the coming years, in line with the country’s low carbon strategy, was necessary for sustainable growth.
An investigation by Greenpeace International has revealed the dumping of industrial wastewater containing a cocktail of toxic chemicals and caustic water, directly into the Citarum River, West Java. International fashion brands, including Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy are linked to this pollution through their direct business relations with PT Gistex Group; the company behind the polluting facility.
In its report, Toxic Threads: Polluting Paradise, the NGO details how the PT Gistex facility has taken advantage of a system that requires little transparency about its activities and where inadequate laws are failing to prevent the release of hazardous chemicals.
The rapid expansion of renewable technologies is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak assessment of global progress towards low-carbon energy, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in an annual report to the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM).
“The drive to clean up the world’s energy system has stalled,” IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven told the CEM, which brings together ministers representing countries responsible for four-fifths of global greenhouse-gas emissions.
And now for something completely different: A Thai-Chinese “Red Bull” billionaire has teamed up with US aerospace and arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin to pilot a potentially revolutionary system that exploits the temperature difference between the deep sea and the surface to generate electricity.
The Reignwood Group – which produces Red Bull in China and is owned by Chanchai Ruayrungruang (also known as Yan Bin) – plans to use a 10-MW Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) off-shore power plant to provide electricity for a new “green resort community” it is developing somewhere on the coast of Southern China.
An estimated USD7.3 trillion a year in damage is being inflicted on the environment, health and other vital benefits for humankind by primary production and processing in such sectors as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, mining, oil and gas exploration and utilities according to a new report.
Natural Capital at Risk – The Top 100 Externalities of Business was launched at the Business for the Environment summit in New Delhi yesterday by the TEEB for Business Coalition (TEEB4B), a global, multi-stakeholder open source platform for supporting the development of methods for natural and social capital valuation in business.
An APL container ship has been awarded the inaugural Green Ship of the Year award at the 2013 International Maritime Awards, organized by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore. Some shipping industry executives congregating in Singapore last week for the Sea Asia conference, however, had strong reservations about the whole concept of eco-ships.
The APL Yangshan, a 10,700-TEU vessel built in 2012, is part of the company’s fleet renewal program that aims to develop a smarter and more eco-efficient global container fleet. The vessel has an Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) that is 33 percent better than the International Maritime Organization’s EEDI reference line for this type and size of ship.
The United States and China will establish a high-level joint working group on climate change in order, they say, to intensify global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the face of "increasing dangers" from global warming.
The two countries "recognize that the increasing dangers presented by climate change measured against the inadequacy of the global response requires a more focused and urgent initiative", they said in a joint statement issued in Beijing on Saturday.
The issue of how to deal with climate change has long vexed relations between the world's two biggest economies, which are also the biggest greenhouse gas emitters.
Chinese fishing boats catch about USD11.5 billion worth of fish from beyond their country's own waters each year – and most of it goes unreported – according to a new study led by fisheries scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
The paper, recently published in the journal Fish and Fisheries, estimates that China's foreign catch is 12 times larger than the catch it reports to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an international agency that keeps track of global fisheries catches.
This report by the World Bank spells out what the world would be like if it warmed by 4 degrees Celsius, which is what scientists are nearly unanimously predicting by the end of the century, without serious policy changes.
Companies in Asia reveal expectations that regulations that could lead to rising costs for reporting and reducing GHG emissions will also be the main sources of climate-related business opportunities.
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