In the wake of last month’s Rana Plaza disaster some of the world's top clothing retailers – including PVH, Tchibo, H&M, Inditex (which owns the Zara chain), Marks & Spencer, Primark and Tesco – have signed up to a legally binding agreement to help finance fire safety and building improvements in the factories they use in Bangladesh.
The official death toll from the collapse of the factory build now stands at 1,127, with 2,438 people injured – many seriously - and another 98 still listed as missing. This makes it the world's worst industrial accident since the Bhopal disaster in India in 1984.
Hyundai Motor Company, South Korea’s largest automaker, is to install the nation’s largest rooftop PV power plant at its manufacturing factory in the city of Asan, on the northern outskirts of Seoul.
Apple's latest store in the shopping metropolis of Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay has come under fire from green activists, who have been pressing hard to fight for tougher control over light pollution.
The US tech giant opened its latest Hong Kong store in the new state-of-the-art Hysan Place shopping mall, which has been awarded the prestigious LEED Platinum Green Building Certification. It seems, however, that Apple, which likes to talk about its comprehensive approach to environmental responsibility, is not stepping up to the plate.
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.
The India’s Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE), a statutory body under the Ministry of Power, has developed a rating energy efficiency building program which is based on the actual performance of a building in terms of its specific energy usage in kilo watt hour per square meter a year.
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.
Hong Kong should be a walker’s paradise. It is compact and dense, with a large number of amenities concentrated in a very small space. Few errands require the use of a car, and in fact over 90 percent of daily journeys occur on public transportation.
Walk Score, a US-based website which calculates walkability based on the proximity and concentration of amenities in a neighborhood, gives much of urban Hong Kong scores of 70/100 or above. Moreover, Hong Kong has a vibrant street food and market culture, boasting areas with enough complexity and variety to keep people entertained for hours. Yet Hong Kongers do not seem to enjoy walking.
In his maiden 2013 Policy Address Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung announced his intention to create an interdepartmental steering committee to promote green buildings.
With buildings accounting for 90 per cent of Hong Kong’s electricity use and 60 per cent of its carbon emissions, this is an important step forward. But without an overarching climate policy or target for Hong Kong, any effort taken by this committee will likely be piecemeal.
According to the NPD Solarbuzz Q1’13 Asia Pacific Major PV Markets Quarterly report, PV demand in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region is forecast to grow to by 50 percent year-on-year 13.5-GW in 2013.
China, Japan, India, and Australia will remain dominant for PV demand in the region, accounting for 90 percent of demand in 2013, however, discrete end-market demand environments are now evolving in each of these countries.
China has announced that all its new buildings will have to meet mandatory energy-saving standards, as well unveiling plans to green-up its existing building stock by 2015.
The Manipur Renewable Energy Development Agency is to install 3,340 solar heaters in houses in the northeastern state of India, in an effort to conserve energy and reduce pollution.
Hong Kong’s new Chief Executive C Y Leung made a range of sweeping promises in his maiden policy address today aimed at tackling the city’s pressing environmental issues, including the city’s stifling air quality and absence of any real efforts towards nature conservation.
"For the well-being of future generations, the government and the community must commit to improving the environment. To tackle key issues such as waste management and air quality requires us to make choices," Leung said
The Climate Group is joining forces with the China Advanced Construction Materials Group (China ACM), one of China’s biggest concrete producers, to tackle one of the biggest side-effects of China’s rapid growth and urbanization: urban construction waste.
The Vietnamese Government and the United Nations have signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) on building an eco-friendly regional facility for the international organization in the country.
Japanese telecoms giant, turned green-energy provider, Softbank Corp has announced that it will use the rooftops of peoples’ homes to generate solar energy and tap into the generous feed-in-tarrifs offered by the Japanese government for renewable power.
CLP Power Hong Kong has selected US-companies Itron and Cisco for a pilot smart metering project. Due to start next year, the pilot project will include around 3,000 residential customers living in both private and public housing and around 1,400 small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers with the company hoping to boost its green credentials.
While advanced economies gradually rebuild their balance sheets, Asia’s emerging markets need to diversify sources of growth to boost GDP, Asian Development Bank (ADB) President Haruhiko Kuroda said Tuesday during an address at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Global Dialogue in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
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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