India’s biggest lender, The State Bank of India has announced a plan to work with Jain Irrigation Systems, Asia’s largest irrigation-equipment maker, to help farmers reduce water usage and increase productivity.
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.
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.
More than 3,300 decomposing pigs have been pulled from the upper reaches of Shanghai’s Huangpu River – a source of drinking water for some of the mega-city’s 23 million inhabitants – but the authorities insist the city’s tap water is still safe to drink.
In a stark illustration of China's problems with environmental pollution, authorities had little immediate explanation on how so many dead pigs ended up in the river or what killed them.
Yesterday thousands of protesters were out in the streets of Tokyo calling for the Japanese Government to forgo nuclear power, a day before the second anniversary of an earthquake and tsunami that triggered the world's worst atomic disaster in 25 years.
The nuclear meltdown at Tokyo Electric Power's (Tepco) Fukushima Daiichi plant forced 160,000 people from their homes, to which many will never return. It also sparked an unprecedented protest movement against nuclear power.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is providing USD111.88 million in loans to Vietnamese low-carbon agriculture projects, according to the state-run Vietnam News Service.
A new irrigation technology that uses half the water of conventional drip irrigation systems has been developed in China. The system, called trace quantity irrigation, is based on the soil capillary force principle, with plants absorbing water as they need it.
China’s top environmental watchdog has rejected a request to publish findings of a high-profile national survey on soil pollution, citing "state secrecy". It is a decision which both legal and environmental experts are calling irresponsible.
With public health at risk – as contaminated land jeopardizes food safety and can cause cancer or other health problems for local residents – critics are asking just what, in its five-year study into ground contamination, the Ministry of Environmental Protection has to hide.
Declining harvests of caterpillar fungus, also known as yarsagumba in the Himalayas, could lead to a relapse in efforts to conserve forests and biodiversity in the mountain region, according to two recent studies.
A partnership between the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ - German Agency for International Co-operation), BASF and Cargill plans to improve the livelihoods of 2,500 coconut growers in the Philippines. The partnership is co-financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development through its program develoPPP.de.
The program focuses on smallholder coconut growers in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, aiming to raise farmers’ incomes by improving productivity and coconut oil quality.
Scientists from Norway and Nepal say they are ready to launch a plan to manipulate the breeding cycle of carp stocks and get the fish species to spawn more than once a year to improve food security in the Himalayan country.
The plan for a low-cost system for off-season fry production was announced last month at the first annual review of the USD3.3 million, four-year, Fish Farming Development (FFD) project that was launched in April 2012.
The Asia Pulp & Paper Group (APP) – one of the world's largest paper companies – has pledged to stop its suppliers cutting down natural forests in Indonesia. It hopes this will help preserve the threatened habitats of endangered species, increase respect for the rights of the region’s indigenous peoples and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from carbon-rich peatland.
APP worked with environmental NGOs Greenpeace and the The Forest Trust (TFT) on the plan, which came into effect at the beginning of February.
Vietnam's government is aware of the dangerous repercussions of climate change on energy supplies and demand. Deputy head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade's Institute of Energy, Nguyen Ba Cuong, told a workshop that climate change impacts could cause an increase in demand for energy, leading to an increased dependence on imported energy, especially coal.
Palm oil companies are grabbing more than 1.5 million acres of land in Liberia and are violating human rights of local communities, warn Liberian NGOs including Friends of the Earth Liberia (SDI - Sustainable Development Institute), Save My Future Foundation (SAMFU) and Social Entrepreneurs for Sustainable Development (SESDev).
China's State Council has issued a circular on soil pollution that sets out a plan to contain the increasingly severe problem. It has ordered a thorough survey into soil conditions be conducted by 2015 and a system be established to rigorously protect arable land and land where drinking water originates.
As if there wasn’t enough controversy surrounding palm oil in Asia already, environmental groups in the Philippines are now raising alarm bells over a plan to establish a one-million hectare plantation on top of what is thought to be the region’s largest wetlands in the Philippines.
According to a report in the Manila Bulletin, quoting Mindanao Development Authority Secretary Lualhati Antonino, the plantation is backed by a Malaysian group led by the Putraya Chamber of Commerce and Industry and will be located least partially on Liguasan Marsh in Mindanao.
Kids leaving their school lunches uneaten beware! The Chinese government has been advised to criminalize the wasting of food.
Yuan Longping, described by Xinhua as China’s most famous agricultural scientist, made the proposal on China Central Television last week. “I am proposing that the government make (regulations and policies) to encourage people to despise the waste of food and to treat it like a crime,” said Yuan.
India has introduced tax on crude palm oil imports for the first time since 2008. According to India's Agriculture ministry crude palm and soybean oil imports will be taxed at 2.5 percent, while the tariff on purchases of refined cooking oils will be maintained at 7.5 percent.
The private equity arm of investment giant Fidelity International has invested USD54 million in biotechnology company, Richcore Lifesciences. The eight-year old Indian company specializes in biofuel and agricultural industries, among other products and is based in Bangalore.
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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