The Philippine government has announced that it will increase its spending on climate change adaptation and mitigation from PHP1 billion (USD24.4 million) in 2011 to PHP13 billion (USD317 million) next year.
Environmental pollution costs up to five percent of Vietnam's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) annually, according to latest figures released by the World Bank.
Temperatures in South-East Asia's Lower Mekong Basin are set to rise by up to three times the global average temperature increase, according to a USAID-funded study.
Previous reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that the basin would see increases in line with the global average of around two degrees Celsius.
But according to a preliminary report by the Mekong Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change Project (Mekong ARCC), parts of the basin could see annual temperatures increase by as much as six degrees Celsius by 2050.
Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City and the Dutch city of Rotterdam are set to sign a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that will see them co-operate in the fight against climate change.
Shenzhen, the Chinese Special Economic Zone and across the border from Hong Kong, will open carbon emissions trading market on Monday 17 June, according to city’s mayor.
Controversial forest products group Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) is once again embroiled in a public relations battle with NGOs over deforestation.
In February the company finally called a halt to the clearing of virgin forest, committing itself to using only farmed trees grown on plantations and embrace monitoring by outside groups to ensure transparency.
Late last month, however, APP received a complaint from Eyes of the Forest (a consortium of local NGOs including WWF and Friends of the Earth Indonesia) that two of its suppliers, PT Daya Tani Kalbar and PT Asia Tani Persada were clearing natural forest in West Kalimantan Province. APP and The Forest Trust (TFT), a non-profit group that is working with APP on its Forest Conservation Policy, said it would look into the charges and publish the findings.
FedEx has deployed 10 all-electric commercial vehicles to its Hong Kong delivery operation. The new vehicles, capable of a full eight hour shift per charge, are the company’s first zero-emission operational vehicles in Asia Pacific.
In an effort to bring greater force to Hong Kong’s battle against air pollution representative of the multiple government policy bureaus have convened in public to present a more integrated approach.
Although by no means as bad as conditions in cities elsewhere in China, Hong Kong has been struggling longer to bring its well-publicized air quality issues under control in the face of mounting public concern. Efforts by previous HK Government administrations to curb air pollution – which has been on the increase again since 2007 – have been criticized for being half-hearted and too narrow.
The Environment and Planning Institute of China's Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has announced the 2010 Green National Accounting results (also called Green GDP Accounting). These show that the country's ecological and environmental degradation costs reached CNY1.53895 trillion (USD248 billion), accounting for about 3.5 percent of the GDP for 2010.
This compares to a cost to the economy of nearly CNY1.4 trillion (USD222 billion), equivalent to 3.8 percent of GDP, in 2009. An estimate of the environmental degradation cost for 2008 was CNY1.27 trillion (USD200 billion), equivalent to 3.9 percent of GDP, although the true figure could be even higher as the authors acknowledge their data is incomplete.
Asia, especially China, is now taking center stage in preparedness for the low-carbon economy according to a report released on Tuesday by The Climate Institute, an independent research organization based in Australia.
Three of the top G20 countries best placed to compete in the global low-carbon economy are now from East Asia, having overtaken their European and American competitors, according to an index which measures how carbon-competitive countries are.
Hong Kong International Airport – Asia’s fourth busiest passenger airport and the world’s busiest cargo airport in 2010 – has received an Airport Carbon Accreditation "Optimization" certificate from Airports Council International.
The Centre for Climate Research Singapore (CCRS), the first institution dedicated to tropical climate and weather of Singapore and the wider Southeast Asia region, has been officially opened.
China’s top five power companies are facing a hefty bill and a potential loss of capacity in order to fit in with the country’s plan to cap total water consumption by 2030, according to a new report.
The implication is that, despite plans to build hundreds of new coal-fired power plants, there is simply not enough water to accommodate them in the China’s most populated and economically developed regions.
According to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), Huaneng, Datang, Huadian, Guodian, and China Power Investment are heavily exposed to water supply disruptions due to the concentration of their portfolios in moderately to severely water-scarce regions, in particular the dry and industrial northeast.
About 90 percent of glaciers in the world’s “Third Pole” are shrinking, accelerated by black carbon being transferred from South Asia to the Tibetan Plateau, a prominent Chinese scientist claims.
Covering more than five million square kilometers and with an average altitude of more than 4,000 meters, the Tibetan Plateau contains the headwaters of several major rivers flowing into surrounding countries and regions.
The region has been drawing increased scrutiny from the international academic community over the past three decades, but the results of former studies have been inconsistent, according to Yao Tandong, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research.
A USD10 million grant has been committed by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) to address the environmental crisis affecting Southeast Asia’s most threatened regions.
China will need to raise up to USD243 billion of additional funds per year by 2020 in order to adequately finance action to curb the impacts of climate change and invest in low carbon development, according to a new report commissioned by the Chinese government’s powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).
The report, authored by The Climate Group and the Research Centre for Climate and Energy Finance at the Central University of Finance and Economics, China, is to be presented to the NRDC, the Ministry of Finance and other top Chinese government entities later this month. It calls for a two stage plan to reform China’s climate finance mechanisms by 2020.
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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