In 2019, the illegal wildlife trade reached staggering levels. Pangolin scales and ivory were being trafficked in massive quantities from Africa to Asia, exposing a network of crime syndicates operating at an industrial scale. The sheer volume of these shipments marked a disturbing milestone, one that revealed the global reach …
Speeding up progress on reducing carbon emissions would save millions of lives, mostly in metropolitan areas of Africa and Asia. To keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world would need to cut the majority of fossil-fuel related carbon emissions this century – and because this would also reduce …
The DREB (dehydration-responsive element binding)-type transcription factors are classified into six subgroups, named A-1 to A-6. The members of DREB A-1 and A-2 subgroups have been reported to be involved in response to various abiotic stresses. However, there were only a few genes belonging to A-3 to A-6 subgroups to …
SoftBank Group Corp has agreed to launch a $930 million Indian joint solar energy venture with Chinese firm GCL System Integration Technology Co Ltd as part of its ambitious India solar investment roadmap. The venture will work on photovoltaic technology, which is used in solar panels. GCL will provide technology …
The regulated price mechanism in China’s power industry has attracted much criticism because of its incapability to optimize the allocation of resources. To build an “open, orderly, competitive and complete” power market system, the Chinese government launched an unprecedented marketization reform in 2015 to deregulate the electricity price. This paper …
The number of pollution sources in China has increased by more than half in eight years, the environment ministry said on Thursday as it embarks on a nationwide survey to determine the damage done by more than 30 years of untrammelled growth. The announcement from the newly minted Ministry of …
China’s environment ministry has urged 28 northern cities to shut factories to tackle a bout of heavy smog in the region, the Shanghai Securities News reported on Tuesday, a sign that tough winter curbs could be extended for the rest of the year. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) …
China met its 2020 carbon intensity target three years ahead of schedule last year, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday, citing the country's top climate official Xie Zhenhua. China, the world's biggest energy consumer, cut its 2005 carbon intensity level, or the amount of climate-warming carbon dioxide it …
Antibiotic use more than doubled in India between 2000 and 2015, fuelling antibiotic resistance that is making common infections such as E.coli, strep throat, pneumonia and tuberculosis more difficult to treat, according to this new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Antibiotic resistance, driven by …
The 69th World Health Assembly approved the Global Health Sector Strategy to eliminate viral hepatitis by 2030. Although no virological cure exists for hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, existing therapies to control viral replication and prophylaxis to minimise mother-to-child transmission make elimination of HBV feasible. We aimed to estimate the …
While the number of coal-fired power plants built worldwide has fallen over the past two years, Asia leads the world in building new coal power. From 2016 to 2017, newly completed coal plants dropped by 41 per cent while construction of new plants dropped by 73 per cent worldwide, according …
Beijing and 33 other northern Chinese cities have issued smog alerts for the next few days as industrial output ramps up again after the end of winter restrictions, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment said on Sunday.The Chinese capital late on Saturday declared its third orange pollution alert of 2018 …
While there have been substantial efforts to quantify the health burden of exposure to PM2.5 from solid fuel use (SFU), the sensitivity of mortality estimates to uncertainties in input parameters has not been quantified. Moreover, previous studies separate mortality from household and ambient air pollution. In this study, we develop …
In a step towards a cleaner environment, the number of coal-based fired power plants under development have seen a steep decline, especially in India and China, a report said on Thursday. The report, however, warns that despite a global coal phase-out trend in new coal plants, emissions from operational plants …
Hundreds of people in a Gambian fishing town on Thursday demonstrated against a Chinese company they say is polluting their environment and the sea. Golden Lead, a Chinese fish meal processing plant, is accused of disposing suspected toxic waste into the sea via pipes, resulting in the washing ashore of …
The West Liaohe River Basin (WLRB) is one of the most sensitive areas to climate change in China and an important grain production base in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. Groundwater depletion in this region is becoming a critical issue. Here, we used the Gravity Recovery and Climate …
Following a decade of unprecedented investment, China now has the world's largest installed base of wind power capacity. Yet, despite siting most wind farms in the wind-rich Northern and Western provinces, electricity generation from Chinese wind farms has not reached the performance benchmarks of the United States and many other …
A plethora of problems face Southern and Northern family agricultures in the current neo-liberal era of financial capital domination worldwide, and has paved the way for the revival of peasant struggles for their social emancipation and legitimate right of access to land and food. Obviously, such struggles also concern all …
OIL shaped the 20th century. In war, the French leader Georges Clemenceau said, petroleum was “as vital as blood”. In peace the oil business dominated stockmarkets, bankrolled despots and propped up the economies of entire countries. But the 21st century will see oil’s influence wane. Cheap natural gas, renewable energy, …
When it comes to energy, no country generates such bittersweet superlatives as China. It is the world’s largest consumer of coal and the second-largest of oil, after America. It has the largest power-generation capacity, by a wide margin. It also produces more carbon dioxide than any other country. China is …
Chinese cities combating smog have significantly cut serious air pollution in the past four years, a study by a University of Chicago team has found. "The data is in - China is winning its war against pollution," said Michael Greenstone, a professor in economics and director of the Energy Policy …
