Cities

Most first-tier cities in China are barely suitable for living due to their poor ecological environment, despite rapid economic development and preferential regulations for investment, said a newly released report by a top Chinese think tank.

Dutch companies are to help Hong Kong deal with its mounting waste problem under an agreement signed by foreign trade minister Lilianne Ploumen and the city’s Secretary for the Environment, K S Wong.

The World Bank has agreed to loan Vietnam’s Da Nang city USD202.5 million to support its Sustainable City Development Project. The funds will be used to help improve the city's drainage systems and arterial roads, upgrade the public transport system and enhance the city government's urban management capacity. World Bank Country Director for Vietnam Victoria Kwakwa told the Vietnam News that she hopes that the project will create a good model for a "green city" and sustainable urban development to inspire similar development in other cities across Vietnam.

The Jakarta city government says it will audit existing high-rise buildings in the Indonesian capital to ensure compliance with a green building code, which comes into effect this month.

Hong Kong customs have had some success of late in tackling the underground trade of illegal wildlife products, with large shipments of smuggled wildlife goods been intercepted through its ports. Between October 2012 and January 2013, three shipments of ivory tusks were seized by Hong Kong customs. The biggest consignment included 1,209 ivory tusks seized in two containers, arriving from Tanzania and Kenya, worth an estimated USD3.5 million. The line between legal and illegal wildlife products can be blurred and rather confusing in Hong Kong. Firstly, the sale of animal parts is ubiquitous. Crocodile skin, earthworms, seahorses and countless others, are synonymous with their use in traditional medicine.

Osaka’s Kansai International Airport is to get the biggest solar installation at an Asian airport following an agreement to develop a 11.6-MW rooftop solar plant.

Builders of Tokyo Skytree, the 65 billion yen (USD656 million) broadcast tower which is almost double the height of the Empire State Building, say they aim to make their mark on more than just the Japanese metropolis’s skyline.

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.

Singapore and Hong Kong are traditional rivals but they also share many similarities. Both are former British colonies, have limited natural resources and are economic powerhouses. Both are also dependent on others for water resources. Singapore sources about 40 percent of its water from Malaysia, while Hong Kong purchases 70-80 percent of its raw water from Guangdong. Despite this similarity, the attitudes of Singapore and Hong Kong towards water security are drastically different.  Singapore is highly pro-active in reducing its water dependency and securing its supply, while Hong Kong appears unbothered that its water security depends on an increasingly threatened source.