China’s central government is reforming the way major tourist attractions are run. It plans to create a unified national parks management system in a bid to halt environmental damage within its protected areas. The new, unified system will cut...
China has made a gargantuan effort to clear Beijing’s smoggy air for an important regional summit this week, closing hundreds of factories and forcing cars off the road, but its efforts have only been partially successful.
A farce played out at an environmental impact assessment (EIA) firm in the southern city of Shenzhen when inspectors called round in early October, this year.
The firm had applied to renew its license to carry out EIAs—reports that are...
Dozens of steel mills in industrial areas straddling the capital are set to shut from November 1 to cut smog before leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting. China had imposed...
Chicken farmers and auto designers follow different career paths, but soon both may be changing how they do their jobs as part of a campaign to clean up China's polluted air.
Emissions from poultry waste and auto engines alike can contain...
I’ve lost track of how many nights I spent traveling to Dongting Lake, a large, shallow lake in Hunan province, central China, famed for being the origin of dragon-boat racing.
In mid-January 2013 I met the Yueyang River Porpoise...
One day after the United States said it would slash carbon emissions from existing power plants by 30% below 2005 levels, China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, said it would set an absolute cap on its emissions by 2016.
Although China’s air pollution keeps making headlines, its water pollution is just as urgent a problem. One-fifth of the country’s...
600 whale sharks are being slaughtered annually at a factory near Wenzhou for foreign and domestic use.
Chinese demand for private transportation soars while air-quality plummets.
Despite a lack of legal restriction, foreign companies in Asia are beginning to set up environmentally sustainable factories to their financial benefit.
In September, an unusual environmental organization was launched in one of the most ancient and significant sites in China—the Songyang Academy, Dengfeng, Henan. Founded in the eleventh century AD, this was one of the four Confucian Academies of...
China had more urban than rural residents for the first time in 2011. The urbanization rate reached 52.6 percent in 2012, a major milestone with significant implications. In the midst of this urban transformation, China’s leaders have...
China’s State Council announced an ambitious package on Friday of 10 measures to combat air pollution. Air pollution is a major problem in China and steps to alleviate the problem are vital to the government’s stated goals of building a “...
In the past weeks, Chinese citizens have learned that the styrofoam boxes from which they eat their lunches will soon be legal. On February 16, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s highest economic policy-making body,...
Yunnan’s drought continues. During China’s annual parliamentary session in March, the deputy party secretary of the southwest Chinese province, Qiu He, blamed spring floodwaters that flow through Yunnan and on into other countries for the water...
China today boasts a collection of ninety-five environmental courts, all of which were set up over the past six years. It is a trend that promises to re-shape Chinese environmental law.
But simply trumpeting this initiative is no guarantee...
As the greatest coal-producing and consuming nation in the world, China would seem an unlikely haven for wind power. Yet the country now boasts a world-class industry that promises to make low-carbon technology more affordable and available to all. Conducting an empirical study of China’s remarkable transition and the possibility of replicating their model elsewhere, Joanna I. Lewis adds greater depth to a theoretical understanding of China’s technological innovation systems and its current and future role in a globalized economy.
While Beijing struggled with pollution, prices of environmental protection stocks surged as investors bought stocks that could rise if policymakers say “enough.”
Well-known Chinese environmentalist Liu Futang has been convicted of carrying out “illegal business activities,” given a three-year suspended prison sentence, and fined 17,000 yuan.
Liu Futang,...
High-profile talk emphasizing environmental action at the Communist Party’s 18th national congress attracted a lot of attention. News from the November proceedings spurred industry demands for more information and pushed stock prices...
After years of neglect, the environment is gradually gaining more attention from China’s leaders. The most noticeable manifestation of this is in their vocabulary.
Six months ago, Hu Jintao, speaking at the opening of a study session for...
The Heilongjiang basin, in northeast China, was attracting gold prospectors as early as the late Qing dynasty, which collapsed in 1912. Panning for gold is damaging for rivers and wetlands, but at the time the region was sparsely populated and...
For a large share of the 750 million urban people worldwide who lack adequate sanitation, flush toilets connected to municipal sewers are not a viable option due to poverty, water shortages, groundwater contamination risks, and other issues. The...
The large banner at the front gate of what used to be called Daxing Ecological Community has been changed to read “Civilized City.” A showroom by the nearby supermarket is locked up and empty while a little further away, near a scenic lake, lies...
Last August, a major pollution story broke in China: 5,000 tonnes of toxic chromium tailings had been dumped near a Yunnan reservoir, contaminating water...
In June 2010, the World Bank organized a team of international experts in urban transport, electric vehicle technologies, and policy and environment to carry out a survey study of China’s New Energy Vehicle (NEV) Program. The preliminary findings...
It was not so long ago that the parts of the globe covered permanently with ice and snow, the Arctic, Antarctic, and Greater Himalayas (“the abode of the snows” in Sanskrit), were viewed as distant, frigid climes of little consequence. Only the...
With the realization of China’s rapid ecological deterioration, partly caused by irresponsible logging, the Chinese government has in recent years taken a series of drastic measures to improve forest coverage. One important approach was to...
