Farewell to Liang Congjie, founder of China’s first environmental NGO
This blog is co-authored with Barbara Finamore.
This past week Liang Congjie, one of the founders of Friends of Nature (FON) and the godfather of China’s environmental movement, passed away. The establishment in 1994 of FON, China’s first legally registered environmental group, paved the way for the creation of more than 3,000 registered, and many more unregistered, environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China today.
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Lu Guang’s Amazing Pollution Photographs
Chinese photographer Lu Guang has won the 2009 W. Eugene Smith Award for his pictures of pollution in China. You can see an extensive set of photos here.
Transparency and China’s Recent Pollution Accidents (UPDATED)
Let’s say information about factory emissions of toxic metals was readily available to the public in Hunan and Shaanxi provinces. Would more than 1,600 children still have been poisoned by lead or cadmium recently? Or would local citizens instead have had the information about health risks in their midst needed to protect themselves or to push the local government and factory officials to take necessary steps to protect the community? Could these pollution problems have been resolved before they reached such a late and devastating stage? Would there have been the sort of unrest seen in recent days? My colleague … Continue reading 阅读全文 Add comment 发表评论(1)
CCTV-9’s Dialogue Focuses on Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI)
Ma Jun, director of the Institute for Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE), and I appeared on the August 23, 2009 edition of CCTV-9’s Dialogue television program to discuss the Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI), our effort with IPE to evaluate and rank government environmental information transparency in 113 Chinese cities (see here for background).
I note a few highlights after the jump, but please feel free to take a look at the entire show. Let us know what you think. We are continuing to work on a full report of our findings, which will be released in early 2010. Environmental transparency has critical implications for pollution in China (including recent heavy metal accidents around the country) and climate change discussions going forward (as I note here).
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The Shaanxi lead poisoning incident and other stories: a China pollution round-up
In recent weeks, Chinese media has been awash in news about pollution accidents or other incidents around China. Here is an overview: Lead poisoning in Fengxiang County, Shaanxi Province: more than 600 children were found to have lead poisoning (see here and here also) [Update: The smelter has been shutdown in the wake of unrest.] Cadmium poisoning in Liuyang County, Hunan Province (see here also). 78 officials sued over ‘environmental neglect’ in Zhengzhou City, Henan Province. 4,000 people sickened by tap water contamination in Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia (see here also). An ammonia gas leak in Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia: … Continue reading 阅读全文 Add comment 发表评论(2)
The Real Significance of China’s First Environmental Group-Led Lawsuit Against the Government
Last week, Henry Sanderson of Associated Press wrote a nice (and accurate) article about the first environmental lawsuit by an environmental group against the government to be accepted in China. But somewhere along the way a copy editor (or whoever is responsible for these sorts of things) appended a dramatic headline that also turns out to be just plain wrong. Google “environmental lawsuit against government China” and you’ll find that dozens of media outlets picked up the AP story with the headline: “China Accepts First Environmental Lawsuit Against the Government” (or similar) This, to be clear, is not accurate. Chinese … Continue reading 阅读全文 Add comment 发表评论(0)
Environmental Transparency in China: the First Annual Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI) and Implications for Climate Change
The First Annual Pollution Information Transparency Index In partnership with the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE), we launched a Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI) last month on June 3rd. This is China’s first index to evaluate environmental information transparency in 113 cities around China. We are now providing for the first time an English translation of our initial PITI findings. One of the central findings of our research concerns what we termed China’s “All-Star Team.” The point here is that if we look at the top performers in each category of transparency we evaluated, we find some Chinese … Continue reading 阅读全文 Add comment 发表评论(1)
NRDC and Partners Establish New Environmental Law Training Base for Judges, Lawyers and Environmental Regulators in Central China
This year, the attention on China’s environment has shifted largely to focus on how China is dealing with climate change. We cannot overstate just how important this has been. Just a few years ago, climate change was not a significant part of the public debate on environmental issues in China. Now we see discussion of climate every single day in Chinese media and China’s government has made a series of aggressive moves to position the country to develop a lower-carbon economy.
In the run-up to Copenhagen and beyond, one issue that other countries will raise with China is whether its climate and environment policies, no matter how good, are implementable on the ground. Continue reading 阅读全文 Add comment 发表评论(2)
Secretary Chu speaks at Tsinghua: long on technological solutions, short on policy
Josh Bushinsky, who is with us at NRDC Beijing for a few months from the University of Chicago Law School, attended the talk by Secretary Chu at Tsinghua last week. We post his summary of the meeting here. His conclusion is that there was ample discussion about technological approaches, but insufficient focus on the policy steps both countries need to take to get us on the right track on climate. Continue reading 阅读全文 Add comment 发表评论(0)
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