Japan has one of the highest installed renewable energy capacities in the world. The country is also one of the world’s largest consumers of energy. Lacking its own fossil fuel resources, it relies on imports for nearly all of its supply. This dependence on imports makes the country vulnerable to …
Japan's meteorology agency said on Wednesday that the El Nino weather pattern, which is often linked to heavy rainfall and droughts, had somewhat weakened and that the weather would likely return to normal by summer. The Japan Meteorological Agency said last month that the El Nino phenomenon peaked between November …
The external radiation exposure levels of high school students in Fukushima Prefecture are within the same range of those living in France, Poland and Belarus, a scientist and a high school student said Monday in Tokyo. Both were among members of a research group that conducted a study on individual …
A Japanese company has a new way to grow vegetables. Kyoto-based Spread, a vegetable production company, announced that it will open the world's first robot run farm, according to a news release. Spread will run a fully automated farm, where robots will replace human labor in almost every possible way, …
Smart Energy Co Ltd has completed one of the world’s largest-scale floating solar power plants in Kawajima, Saitama Prefecture. The plant, which has an output of about 7.5MW, started operations on the surface of an agricultural reservoir. The area of the reservoir is about 130,000 square meters, and 27,456 monocrystalline …
Yahoo Japan said Wednesday it is strengthening policing of illegal ivory on its online commerce site as criticism grows it is supporting a trade that fuels the slaughter of wild elephants. A spokeswoman for the company said it prohibits sales of raw ivory and ivory products that breach a 1989 …
Most parts of mainland China experienced their coldest weather in decades over the weekend. Unusually cold weather in eastern Asia has been blamed for more than 65 deaths, disrupted transportation and brought the first snow to a subtropical city in southern China in almost 50 years. Here is a look …
The government announced Saturday it plans to implement from April antipoverty measures in Okinawa Prefecture targeted at children, including the placement of more than 100 specialized staff and the creation of around-the-clock assistance centers. Child poverty has become a serious issue in the nation’s southernmost prefecture, which saw per capita …
Japan on Wednesday signed a loan agreement with the central government to provide Rs 1,000 crore to facilitate pollution control and decline of Pune's Mula-Mutha rivers, a statement said. Under the National River Conservation Plan, a loan agreement was signed between Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the central government. …
The chairman of Railway Board, secretary in the Department of Expenditure, Secretary DIPP & Foreign Secretary will be part of the committee The Prime Minister’s Office has constituted a committee under Arvind Panagariya, vice-chairman of the NITI Aayog, to hasten the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail Corridor, meant for bullet trains between …
An Indonesian government-sanctioned but independent human rights commission has told Japan to carefully review the construction of a controversial $4 billion thermal power plant funded by an Indonesia-Japan consortium as human rights violations during the land acquisition process have been uncovered. “We asked Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and (the …
Exposure to ambient air pollution is a major risk factor for global disease. Assessment of the impacts of air pollution on population health and the evaluation of trends relative to other major risk factors requires regularly updated, accurate, spatially resolved exposure estimates. We combined satellite-based estimates, chemical transport model (CTM) …
Tests on the most common type of influenza found in Chinese pigs reveal that it has the potential to transmit easily in humans, posing a pandemic threat similar to the virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 after jumping from swine to people. A research team from China and Japan …
Japanese cities are entering the renewable-energy business, the latest phase in a shake-up of the nation’s power sector in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis. So far, about 14 cities have formed companies to generate clean energy from local resources and sell it to area businesses and homes. …
Until the 1960s, forest-clearing accounted for most anthropogenic carbon emissions. Now it causes around 10%—a decline that led many at the UN climate summit in Paris to focus their efforts elsewhere. Though Norway, Germany and Britain said they would make a billion dollars a year available for averting tropical deforestation …
WASHINGTON -- India, China and the Middle East, with their fast-growing economies and expanding industry, have seen growing air pollution, according to NASA scientists who tracked the trends over the last decade in various regions and 195 cities around the globe. According to the findings, US, Europe and Japan have …
The Environment Ministry has sought a record ¥522.3 billion in its budget proposal for fiscal 2016, with most of the spend related to decontamination work in areas affected by the March 2011 nuclear disaster. The proposed figure for the year from April, presented at a meeting led by the ruling …
Say in light of its own experience, Japan should not put profits of its nuclear industry before the environment. CLAIMING that in the wake of opposition to nuclear power in Japan, the nuclear industry there was protecting its profits by getting into a civil nuclear agreement with India, the Maharashtra-based …
Japan is fuelling the trade in illegal ivory and undermining international efforts to protect Africa’s elephants by failing to crack down on illegal registration practices, according to a report released today. Although Japan signed a 1989 convention banning the global trade in ivory, traders are registering tusks that are of …
Scientists from the United States, Japan, and China are racing to perfect satellite technology that could one day measure greenhouse gas emissions from space, potentially transforming the winner into the world's first climate cop. Monitoring a single country's net emissions from above could not only become an important tool to …
Japan's weather bureau said on Thursday that the El Nino weather phenomenon is at its peak now and there is a strong possibility it would stretch into spring but weather would return to normal by summer. The El Nino, or a warming of sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific, typically leads …
