Responsible Roundups

Responsible Roundup: Urbanization, air control, water supply, clean energy, green biz and laugh-out-loud climate crisis

Every Friday, ResponsibleChina highlights major news about the environment, CSR and social entrepreneurship in China. For tips or suggestions, please send an email to erica [at] responsiblechina.com.

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT THIS WEEK…

CHINA IS CROWDED.
Did you know a billion people will live in China’s cities within one generation? The McKinsey Quarterly published an article about how urbanization will affect China and what policy makers must do to cope with these changes. The conclusion? “Encouraging more concentrated development, with growth channeled to the largest cities, offers the optimal trade-off between the benefits and potential problems of urbanization.” Rich Brubaker from All Roads Lead to China says, “Overall – their guidance is correct. China is going to continue to urbanize on a scale never seen before, but I am just not sure it is going to happen on the same level, at the same speed, and as McKinsey says it will.” Read Brubaker’s full analysis here.

BEIJING IS TRYING TO CLAMP DOWN ON AIR POLLUTION.
According to China Bystander, “Beijing’s pre-Olympic anti-pollution controls went into effect on Sunday and a couple of days on, this Bystander is told, they are having some beneficial effect in making the city less smoggy.” The China Economic Review says “the results are muddled.” Have any of you Beijingers out there noticed a difference, yet?

BEIJING IS RUNNING OUT OF WATER.
Probe International recently released a report about Beijing’s water crisis. Read RespChi’s post about Coca-Cola’s CSR efforts to help out with the water situation. And here’s something about the Yangtze River (also facing a major crisis), courtesy of National Geographic.

CHINA IS FIGURING OUT WAYS TO PRODUCE CLEAN ENERGY.
Thanks to the China Law Blog, I found out that the U.S. Department of Commerce published an online report, “Clean Energy, An Exporter’s Guide to China.” According to the Executive Summary, “This report is intended as a clean energy technology market overview for China, with two primary objectives: (1) to analyze the clean energy markets in China and (2) to identify opportunities for trade and investment through 2020.” You might also want to read a primer about China’s climate policy on China Dialogue. Or this recent article about Chinese entrepreneurs turning to wind power, in line with the government’s plan to produce “five gigawatts (GW) of wind generation capacity, meaning 28% growth annually” by 2010.

SHANGHAI BUSINESSES ARE GOING GREEN.
Shanghaiist informs us that there’s a bunch of players that are striving to become more environmentally friendly. Shout-outs to URBN Hotels, Emissions Zero, AOO, Arc8x, and LiveGreenEco. Also, we hear the Jane Goodall Institute in Shanghai is running the The Eco-Office Evaluation Program, which, according to our blogger Sophia, who is the program’s project manager, “links professionally trained local students and offices through an environmental audit to encourage green office practices. Students preform a unobtrusive audit and follow up with technical suggestions to create a “greener” office. The result is a more sustainable office culture and reduced waste and resources use. The program is entirely free of charge for offices and students from beginning to end and can be completed in less than two hours.”

AND…FINALLY…THE CLIMATE CRISIS CAN BE FUNNY?
Found via Globalisation and the Environment: “Cartoonists use humour to tackle climate change” at The Guardian. “Surely, the threat posed by climate change is no laughing matter? But cartoonists from over 50 countries have shown that barbed humour can be a powerful weapon in the fight to halt global warming,” David Adam reports.

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