The Philippines Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) has said a Dutch-Filipino solar power company wants to rent non-agricultural lands in rural areas to establish solar farms under the country’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, according to the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
About 100,000 people living in the southern China’s Three Gorges Dam area could be relocated over the next three to five years with massive landslides and bank collapses expected to hit the area, a government official said yesterday.
Following the introduction of a regulation at the beginning of last year obliging local authorities have to set aside 10 percent revenue for the purpose, China spent USD4.3 billion on farmland water conservation projects in 2011.
According to research presented at the Climate Smart Agriculture conference in Bangkok last week, climate change may be causing outbreaks of new, invasive pests that could threaten Southeast Asia's multi-billion dollar cassava industry and the livelihoods of thousands of small farmers.
Researchers in the United States say agricultural waste from coconut and mango farming could generate significant amounts of off-grid electricity for rural communities in South and South-East Asia.
Many food crops have tough, inedible parts that cannot be used to feed livestock or fertilise fields. Examples of this material — known as “endocarp” — include coconut, almond and pistachio shells, and the stones of mangoes, olives, plums, apricots and cherries.
China’s Three Gorges Corp yesterday began construction of a dam that will flood the last free-flowing portion of the middle reaches of the Yangtze, the country's longest river, according to the Shanghai Daily.
Environmental scientists have issued strong warnings against the development of 12 hydropower projects along the Mekong River claiming that they will cause non-recoverable damage to the river’s ecosystem as well as threaten food security of residents in the riparian countries.
The Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Friday announced relief for the solar energy sector by proposing to scrap duties on imports of solar-thermal equipment as the country it seeks to reduce project costs for Reliance Power and other developers adding plants as part of his annual budget speech
The rapid growth of cities across the developing world has resulted in urban areas overtaking rural communities as being the most vulnerable to wide scale flooding, according to a report from the World Bank.
Irrigation in China dates back more than 2,500 years and has been a major factor in supporting Chinese civilization and prosperity over the millennia. While the traditional system of dams, levees, canals and sluices continue to be used, it has been greatly augmented by ground water pumping in recent decades.
The impact of this on water tables is quite well known but new research has revealed that the practice also has a significant carbon footprint. A paper, published in Environmental Research Letters, estimates that the pumping systems that support China’s immense irrigation network produce 33.1 MtCO2e (33.1 mega tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent) per year.
The government of India has released a draft report, The National Water Policy 2012, which would favor the privatization of water-delivery services in the country by suggesting pricing of water to recover operation costs and administration of water projects, according to Times of India.
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has reported what it calls unprecedented growth for Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO) last year. In its inaugural annual quantities review, RSPO reported that the year-on-year supply of CSPO in 2011 increased by 73 percent, reaching 4,798,512 metric tons compared to 2,773,567 metric tons in 2010, while year-on-year sales volume increased 94 percent.
The association, which brings together buys and sellers, says its “2011 RSPO CSPO Growth Interpretation Narrative” (2011 GIN is the first of its kind for a sustainable commodity.
A group of 204 aquatic farmers in Tuoji Island, in China’s Shandong Province want oil giant ConocoPhillips to pay 606 million yuan (USD96 million) in compensation for losses caused by oil leaks in Bohai Bay last June, according to a report in the Global Times.
Two Chinese provinces have found a novel way to settle a long simmering dispute over compensation for environmental damage to the Xin’an River using one of China’s most traditional pastimes - placing a bet.
New research from KPMG International has found that that if companies had to pay for the full environmental costs of their production, they would lose 41 cents for every USD in earnings on average.
The finding is contained in a newly released study by the firm, Expect the Unexpected: Building Business Value in a Changing World, which identifies 10 “megaforces” that will significantly affect corporate growth globally over the next two decades.
The traditional Chinese farming calendar, still used by millions of farmers to guide their farming activities, should be adapted to reflect global warming, say scientists.
The 24 'solar terms', a set of timings reflecting the seasonal cycle, were laid down 2,000 years ago as a supplement to the traditional Chinese calendar. They are marked on the calendar under specific dates — two terms per month — and refer to agricultural activities.
The terms, which mark seasonal transitions and indicate the stages crop growth, include 'great cold', 'great heat', 'rain water', 'waking of insects' and 'grain in ear'.
Nepal is looking to scale up its flagship household biogas program, which has made forays into other developing countries in Asia and Africa.
Since its program was initiated in 1992 with support from SVN (the Netherlands Development Organization), Nepal has installed over 240,000 household biogas plants. These have a thermal energy capacity of 444-MW megawatts and greenhouse gas savings of 367,409 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year and the Nepalese model has also attracted ADB investment.
Groundwater levels have dropped in many places across the globe over the past nine years, a pair of gravity-monitoring satellites finds, writes ScienceNews. The decline is especially pronounced in parts of India, China and the Middle East, where expanding agriculture has increased water demand, according to a study carried out by the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling in Irvine.
Governments across Asia need to improve their regulation of way that pesticides are marketed and should ban certain pesticides from use in rice production completely, according to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), writes Mike Ives of Sci-Dev.net.
IRRI, which is based in Manila, the Philippines, released an action plan listing potential strategies for scaling back pesticide use and adopting ecological growing techniques at a conference in Vietnam, held under the title "Threats of Insecticide Misuse in Rice Ecosystems — Exploring Options for Mitigation".
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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