ChinaDialogue Latest Articles
China and the world discuss the environment
Understanding China’s climate policy
(Jul 23)
The politics of global warming are increasingly focused on the stance taken by the world’s fastest growing economy. Zhuang Guiyang discusses the difficulty of analysing climate-change policy-making in China.
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As the world gets warmer, the international community is turning up the heat on the Chinese position at international climate-change negotiations. A developing China has become a key part of the meetings; any changes in its position are accompanied by immediate speculation about the implications.
However, it is not easy to interpret China’s climate-change policy. The world’s largest developing nation is faced with unique challenges. Overseas...
Why obstacles to a deal on climate are mountainous
(Jul 22)
Solving the carbon-emissions problem requires concerted action among unequal participants over at least a century. Yet, writes Martin Wolf, the right thing to do is to try.Something has changed in the debate on man-made climate change: the United States is engaged. But its engagement – or at least the engagement of President George W Bush – is neither enthusiastic nor unconditional. In particular, at discussions among the heads of governments of the Group of Eight leading countries in Japan, Bush stressed that China and India
had to participate. In this, he was right: it will be impossible to tackle the problem without the participation of leading emerging countries. The question is on what terms they do so.
This is to ignore the debate on whether man-made climate change is either plausible or correctly assessed. I find the arguments sufficiently cogent to justify action. Above all, I find persuasive the
argument of Professor Martin Weitzman of Harvard University that it is worth pa...
Default settings and modern lifestyles
(Jul 21)
Have we lost the pleasure that beautiful homemade things used to bring us? Do we rely too much on new and disposable items? Yu Aiqun muses on simpler and happier times.“Default settings” – in
information-technology terminology -- refers to the basic way a computer system is set up until you decide to make any specific changes. One could say that in our lives, running water, flush toilets, electric lighting, gas stoves and telephones are all part of our own default settings.
As a Chinese woman of a certain age, I have experienced life without these defaults. When I was my daughter’s age, running water was only provided for four hours a day – two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. Households had to store water in buckets. My mother used to get up early every morning when water was available and wash the whole family’s clothes. The only electrical appliances owned by our family of four were two 25-watt lights, two 15-watt lights, and a radio.
I was 16 before we had a t...
Debate: are eco-towns the face of the future?
(Jul 21)
As housing needs grow along with urban populations, governments and developers are increasingly keen on “green” projects, writes Maryann Bird. Are they a wise move, and would you want to move in?
“The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home” is one of the innumerable proverbs attributed to Confucius. While the saying actually refers to the strength of individual families rather than to the physical soundness of buildings, Confucius’s words can be applied today to another kind of “integrity” of homes: their eco-friendliness.
As governments and the private sector seek ways to work together to blunt the negative consequences of climate change, housing issues are increasingly a focus of their efforts. More and more, officials and property developers are turning to the concept of eco-towns as populations expand and calls for sustainability in new construction grow louder.
Small, often spiritually based, eco-villages have long existed around the world, but mounting envi...
Letting nature heal itself
(Jul 18)
The ecosystems destroyed by the deadly earthquake in May formed over the course of millennia. But their natural recovery will take only decades, writes ecologist Jiang Gaoming.
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The May 12 earthquake in Wenchuan killed more than 69,000 people. The tremors also caused landslides, uprooted vegetation and destroyed natural ecosystems. The government not only has to rebuild homes, but also repair damaged ecosystems.
Plant populations develop in one of two types of succession (the process by which ecosystems develop and change over time), those of dry or moist environments. These types of succession both create soil through phys...
Saving the planet will be difficult, but do not despair
(Jul 17)
How the burden of climate-change adjustment might be shared between rich and emerging nations is at the heart of current debate. With strategy and technology, Philip Stephens believes, the challenge is manageable.
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The shortest distance in the discourse about climate change is that between denial and despair. The head wrested from the sand soon becomes the head in the hands. “Nothing needs doing” slides effortlessly into “nothing can be done”.
For all the accumulated evidence to the contrary, there are still a determined few who see global warming as the invention of do-gooders and of scientists who want to be soothsayers...
Three time frames for climate change
(Jul 16)
In understanding and dealing with global warming, the world has distinct but limited periods in which to act. For our leaders, the next 18 months will be the key. Saleemul Huq explains.
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Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity. The world's leaders and citizens can and must face up to this fact and deal with it, and they have three distinct time frames in which to act.
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Slideshow: air pollution in Beijing
(Jul 15)
As the Olympics approach, athletes have raised concerns about the Chinese capital’s smoggy skies. A series of haunting pictures by Beijing-based photographer Sean Gallagher illustrates the problem.EDITOR'S NOTE: These pictures were all taken by Sean Gallagher, a British photographer based in China, between June 26 and July 2, 2008. All of the photographs were taken in Beijing, and most of them depict vehicles that have been left or abandoned under the raised ring roads in the city centre. In this series, the photographer has not set out to show ordinary cars in the Chinese capital; he uses abandoned vehicles as static objects, which illustrate the quantity of dust and sand that accumulates in the city's air. Some of this dust is from naturally occurring sandstorms, but – as the photographer points out in his
comment – much of it also comes from the booming construction industry.
Backgrounder: air pollution in China
S
ixteen of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China. More th...
The Zipingpu dam: after the quake
(Jul 14)
The May 12 earthquake hit hard at the largest hydropower project in Sichuan province. Li Xiaoming was on the scene soon after the quake, and writes that even if the immediate dangers have passed, caution is still needed.
The May 12 earthquake in southwest China caused a crisis at the Zipingpu dam. Situated on the Min River, it is the largest hydroelectric station in Sichuan province. Power generation equipment was damaged and ground to a halt. The flood gates could not be opened and the waters behind the dam rose quickly as heavy rains began to fall. The dam was only made safe on May 17, when engineers were able to force the gates open.
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In the developing world, a costly thirst
(Jul 11)
The world’s poorest people are paying disproportionately high prices for clean water. How can a fair and realistic cost be applied to such a critical resource? Fiona Harvey reports.
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Slum-dwellers in Dar es Salaam pay the equivalent of US$8 for 1,000 litres of water, bought over time and by the canister. In the same Tanzanian city, wealthier households connected to the municipal supply receive that amount for, roughly, just 34 US cents. In the United Kingdom, the same volume of tap water costs $1.62 and i...
