The official in change of China’s climate change program says the country will have enabling legislation to support a national carbon market in place by 2015.
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 European Union (EU) has agreed to bestow PHP189 million (USD4.5 million) to the Philippines to help it promote cleaner and more energy-efficient initiatives in the country.
Korean steel giant Posco’s planned INR50,000 crore (USD12 billion) plant in the Indian state of Odisha is facing new troubles as a report on the project’s 2011 environmental impact assessment (EIA) and subsequent clearance has highlighted a number of breaches.
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) has called on one of its members, Asia Pacific Resources International (APRIL), to clean up its act and cease its on-going large-scale destruction of Indonesia’s rainforest.
A new global forum aimed at intensifying the dialogue on the deteriorating conditions in the North Pole could include the likes of China, India and Singapore among its member countries.
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.
Consumer product giant Unilever has announced that its five-year strategy to slash carbon emissions has resulted in the reduction of more than one million tonnes of CO2 from its manufacturing and logistics operations.
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.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is extending USD200 million in loans to the Dynagreen Environmental Protection Group to help small and medium-sized cities in China turn their growing mountains of solid waste into a sustainable source of renewable energy under an agreement signed on Friday in Beijing.
India could be on the verge of departing from its long-held negotiating position on climate change and preparing to adopt binding emission reduction commitments.
A report in the Times of India says that as part of the preparation, the government is likely to commission four studies including one assessing by when the country’s emissions will peak in absolute terms.
“The year when India’s emissions trajectory peaks before it starts to dip is expected to influence the date from when the government will be ready to take on a cap in absolute terms on greenhouse gases under the new global climate compact to be signed in 2015,” the newspaper said.
Indonesia’s House of Representatives yesterday passed two international conventions aimed at protecting the country’s biological diversity and the environment and is expected to pass another controversial bill against deforestation within this week.
Three companies with economic land concessions in Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province have allegedly been logging a wildlife sanctuary since late last year, resulting in the loss of thousands of protected trees and the livelihoods of dozens of families.
With air quality seriously deteriorating in some of China's major metropolises last year, the decision by expatriates to leave Beijing has been described as wise by the author of a green report, based on government data, which has just been released in Beijing.
Two months after access to a ground pollution study was denied on the grounds that it was a "state secret", an official at China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MOEP) has said that the data would be released “very soon,” according to Reuters.
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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