Perspective

Reclaiming land from the sea has prompted economic growth in China's coastal cities, but nowadays, as it's done for the purpose of property development, it causes worries over housing safety and damage to the marine ecosystem.

Indonesia is emerging as the next boom market for investment in the clean and conventional energy sectors. It might be early days relative to China, but the evidence continues to mount.

A belief that 'small' hydropower systems are a source of clean energy with little or no environmental problems is driving the growing interest in mini, micro, and pico hydro systems that generate from less than 5 kilowatts up to 10 megawatts of energy.

With China's new Foreign Investment Catalog pushing several additional green industries into the "encouraged" category and the 12th Five Year Plan declared the "greenest in history," China is abuzz with talk about the green sector.

It seems not even the prestige of winning, not one, but two high-profile contracts to provide fleets of electric buses to Singapore and Frankfurt could help Chinese rechargeable battery and auto maker BYD Company raise what it expected from the Shenzhen markets.

Reflecting profound concerns of developing countries, a new report has strongly criticized The World Bank Group for promoting false solutions to climate change, such as carbon trading, mega-dams, agro-fuels and industrial monoculture tree plantations.

International voluntary sustainability standards - such as the Forest Stewardship Council, which certifies sustainably managed forests and forest products - are tools for verifying socially sound and eco-friendly goods and services that play an increasingly important role in global trade. However, they are still relatively new and underused in China.

Growing urbanisation does not have to spell disaster for either human health or the environment, and both research and underused technologies can help mitigate its negative effects, a conference has heard.

The nuclear power industry likes to point to the fact that, on the whole, it has a pretty solid safety record. Apart from the Chernobyl disaster, no nuclear workers or members of the public are known to have died as a result of exposure to radiation due to at an incident at a commercial nuclear reactor.