Michele Kearney's Environmental Blog - Environmental degradation and waning natural resources including energy resources threaten U.S. security. And the loss of renewable natural resources, including forests, fresh water, fish and fertile soils, can drive political instability and conflict in the developing world, and around the globe. In short, natural resoures, energy and the environment are national security issues.
China faces worsening water shortages, a government official warned.
The country's water shortages, along with serious river pollution and a
deteriorating aquatic ecosystem, pose a growing threat to economic and
social development, Hu Siyi, China's vice minister of water resources
said Thursday, state-run news agency Xinhua reports.
China's population of 1.3 billion people consum
Several factors could be contributing to China’s sudden entrance into coal import markets, including
transportation bottlenecks, environmental and safety considerations, economic factors, and concerns
about depleting coking coal reserves.
The
nature of the climate challenge in the immediate future will be
determined by China and the world’s largest carbon emitters—not U.N.
summits.
The Great Wall of China is not the only thing you can see from space.
Fish farming cages are clearly visible through Google Earth's satellite
images and University of British Columbia researchers have used them to
estimate the amount of fish being cultivated in the Mediterranean.
US chemical and agribusiness giant DuPont announced Tuesday it will
build a "state-of-the-art" seed bank in Beijing to boost its molecular
breeding business in China's rapidly growing agriculture market.
DuPont said the facility at the state-owned Beijing International Flower
Port would employ about 50 researchers and would focus on producing
"high-yielding maize hybrids."
President Pratibha Patil and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Wednesday
called for more investment in agriculture, especially in rainfed and
dryland farming, to achieve food security and inclusive growth
An interactive web tool has been developed to improve the accuracy and
extent of global land use and forest cover information. The new
'Geo-Wiki' uses Google Earth and information provided by a global
network of volunteers to fill in 'data gaps' and to verify existing land
cover information. Developers this week have launched a Geo-Wiki
competition to raise awareness of the tool and to encourage
DuPont and Yingli Energy (China) have signed a $100 million strategic
agreement for photovoltaic materials aimed at accelerating the adoption
of solar energy to address one of the world's biggest challenges -
reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
Efforts of countries in the Asia-Pacific region to boost their offshore
exploration and production (E and P) activities and reduce their rising
dependency on imported oil and gas will be hindered by territorial
disputes, a report by energy intelligence specialist GlobalData has
found
Electric cars have been heralded as environmentally friendly, but
findings from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researchers show that
electric cars in China have an overall impact on pollution that could be
more harmful to health than gasoline vehicles.
The
week leading up to Chinese New Year is a period during which many
Chinese are focused on their preparations to return home for the
holidays. But unbeknownst to the citizens of the Southern Chinese city
of Hechi, industrial waste discharge, containing high levels of cadmium,
was also leeching into a 100-kilometer stretch of the Longjiang and
Liujiang rivers in Guangxi Province.
Although cadmium contamination was reportedly detected in Hechi as early
as January 15, the only specific information made public by Hechi
officials was an official media release on January 19. The lack of
concrete, reliable and very importantly detailed information impeded
disaster relief efforts by city officials further down the river and
also led to a panic induced rush by concerned citizens who packed out
supermarkets in order to buy bottled water.
The reaction from local officials in downstream Liuzhou was considerably
better: on January 23 they began releasing data ...
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