China’s State Oceanic Administration (SOA) revealed on Wednesday that the country’s nearshore seawater suffers from severe pollution and water quality has actually degraded.
In an exclusive interview with environmental website BusinessGreen,Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) has thanked Greenpeace for the work the activist NGO has done over the past decade to help the company come around to halting its deforestation activities in Indonesia.
Hong Kong is believed to be the world's worst city for light pollution, with levels in the popular tourist shopping area of Tsim Sha Tsui, 1,200 times brighter than a normal dark sky. Unlike other world cities - including London, Frankfurt, Sydney and Shanghai - Hong Kong has no laws to control external lighting.
The findings were described as shocking by survey leader Dr Jason Pun Chun-shing, of the Department of Physics at the University of Hong Kong, who said he could find nowhere else on earth as badly affected.
Institutions from South Korea and Scotland have signed the countries’ first strategic agreement yesterday to jointly develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.
Ho Chi Minch City has asked the World Bank for a loan to improve the city’s flood control plan during a visit to several of the Vietnamese city’s flood control projects Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Cao Duc Phat, and representatives of the Bank.
Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) has announced it will enforce eight measures in 2013, to decrease the intensity of major pollutants by two percent annually. But experts say that they do not feel optimistic about the new clean air plan which includes closing more than 450 high-polluting companies and scrapping 180,000 old motor vehicles.
Despite China’s new premier, Li Keqiang, taking a hard line on pollution at his first news conference Sunday, others, including Communist Party delegates at the national People’s Congress are apparently not convinced that enough action will be taken by the government to clean the country up.
In a rare show of Chinese disunity hundreds of delegates at the Congress showed they were also upset at pollution when they issued a protest against the rising level of pollution in the country and took a stand on environmental policy during a meeting on Saturday.
Implementing smart meters in Mumbai, India’s most populous city, has helped cut water losses by half, according to Itron, the largest US maker of metering devices.
China will expand the country’s air quality monitoring network by installing 440 monitoring stations in 116 Chinese cities by the end of the year, according to the vice minister of environmental protection.
The world’s only wildlife trade treaty yesterday confirmed measures to protect sharks and rays at the final day of 11-day meeting of the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species, CITES, despite desperate moves by Japan and Grenada, in the Caribbean, to derail the agreement.
Singapore will enforce Euro V emission standards from January 1, 2014 on new diesel vehicles, according to Vivian Balakrishnan, the environment and water resources minister.
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.
Against the expectations of some, an international conference on endangered species has voted to restrict cross-border trade on several species of critically endangered but commercially valuable sharks and rays.
Delegates to the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), currently taking place in Bangkok, passed the motion by a two-thirds majority, despite some hefty lobbying by China and Japan.
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.
The term PM2.5 will disappear in China and be replaced with a new Chinese name at the behest of the China National Committee for Terms in Sciences and Technologies.
Hundreds of items of medical waste, including syringes and infusion bags, have been found washed up on a beach at a Hong Kong residential resort, according to local English-language newspaper, the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
China’s tax authorities will wait at least another year to introduce a tax on carbon, deferring to concern that economic growth might suffer, according to a Ministry of Finance (MoF) official.
Planning for a carbon tax has been underway since China’s 12th Five-year Plan was announced two years ago. At the beginning of last year MoF experts suggested levying a carbon tax in 2012 at 10 yuan (USD1.6) per tonne of CO2, increasing to 50 yuan (USD8) per tonne by 2020. Just last month Jia Chen, head of the Ministry of Finance’s Tax Policy Division, revealed a new set of taxation policies, including a tax on CO2 emissions, designed to preserve the environment.
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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