Liu Xiao spends her weeks visiting sludge and organic waste treatment plants across China. The travel can be tiring but as a technical and policy adviser on waste management she must help implement President
Russian oil output in 2003 was increasing at such a swift pace even Saudi Arabia worried about upstart energy companies - including Yukos and Sibneft - then posting production gains of more than 20 per cent. But from 2004 the Moscow government changed its tax regime and began to take over privately held assets, including Yukos, and so Saudi Arabia's fears proved short-lived.
Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil producer, has put on hold any plans to further increase long-term production capacity from its vast oil fields, its most powerful policymakers have said. In a series of statements, including one by the king himself, the kingdom has warned consumers it does not believe there is a need for further expansion, an assumption disputed by the world's biggest developed countries.
Malaysia will spend $1.3bn to achieve food security and turn the Borneo state of Sarawak into a "rice bowl' for the nation, in response to surging agricultural prices and fears of shortages. The plan to stockpile food and increase domestic production of rice, fruits and vegetables would bring Malaysia closer to self-sufficiency, Abdullah Badawi, prime minister, said at the weekend.
Developing countries are fighting hard to retain the right to increase farm im-port tariffs in spite of slashing them rapidly to cope with the global food crisis. Faint signs of progress in the troubled "Doha round" of global trade talks last week in Geneva were imperilled by a fresh dispute over poor countries' ability to protect their farmers with tariffs.
Remember the green old days? They seem like only last year. In fact they were only last year: according to one long-running opinion poll, concern for the environment among consumers reached a peak in January 2007. Since then it has all but disappeared.
Japan's environment minister yesterday criticised George W. Bush's plan to minimise greenhouse emissions, saying the US president's ambitions "fell far short" of expectations. Reacting to Mr Bush's pledge to halt the growth of US carbon emissions by 2025, Ichiro Kamoshita said: "Truthfully, I want the US to tackle the issue of global warming more proactively." Japan, which hosts the Group of Eight summit in Hokkaido in July, wants to forge a compromise between the US and Europe on the one hand and big developing countries, particularly China and India, on the other.
Urgent action to help the world's poorest farmers help themselves would make a significant contribution to tackling the global food crisis in a single growing season, according to Jeffrey Sachs, United Nations development adviser. "In much of the poorest parts of the world, the potential for significant increases in food production is very real," said Mr Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and adviser to Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.
Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday pledged more money and a new global partnership to bring down food prices - the latest ambitious but ill-defined plan to combat the worldwide crisis. The French president doubled to
Greenhouse gases have been the big focus of most companies' environmental efforts for several years, with pollution a close second. But another equally pressing environmental issue has received much less attention: water. For most companies in the developed world, water is not much of a problem. Water bills are generally a tiny part of overheads, and unless there is a drought or flood, companies can count on it flowing from the tap.
The IT industry accounts for about 2 per cent of global carbon emissions - close to the same as the aviation sector - and has an important role to play in the environmental agenda. The main issue for IT is the amount of electricity that computers use. Data centres in particular have come into focus as heavy consumers of power. The average centre uses 50 times more energy than the average office and can cost around
