The 6th Open Government Partnership (OGP) Global Summit begins this week in Ottawa. Probe International’s Patricia Adams will moderate a discussion on identifying good practices and challenges in assets return and the promotion of peer-learning in assets recovery and monitoring. Organized by the Africa Network for Environment and Economic Justice (ANEEJ) and the MacArthur Foundation.
China’s environment minister enlists people power to help clean up the country’s “black and stinky” waterways.
Experts fear Lintao’s dry-up is a sign of things to come. Probe International fellow and noted Chinese environmental journalist, Dai Qing, says China’s water scarcity and toxicity is the greatest danger facing her country today.
Journalist Sharron Lovell’s gallery of striking images portray the losing end of China’s massive water transfer scheme to alleviate some by taking from others.
Imagine waking up one day to be told your home and way of life is to be upended for the construction of a massive state water project?
Putin knows where Russia’s real threats lie.
Now that Beijing has won the right to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, talk has moved from the problem of snow in a city distinctive for its arid climate, sandstorms and perpetual lack of water, to the virtues of artificial snow (despite the amount of water fake snow takes to manufacture). Meanwhile, a long-long range weather forecast, conducted by the city’s meteorological bureau, predicts natural snowfall is likely to increase in the areas slated for competition action in seven years’ time.
If Greece leaves the eurozone, Russia will enter it, casting a chill over Europe.
Federal prosecutors say the Norte Energia consortium behind the $11-billion Belo Monte dam, the world’s third largest, has violated 55 previously agreed-to items that are endangering locals’ means of survival. Efforts to move residents should be suspended, they say.
This Huffington Post blog, by Peter Neill, founder and director of the World Ocean Observatory, looks at the global love affair with big dams and the perils of forcing water to acquiesce to political ambitions and national pride, and the sometimes dangerous results of doing so.
China’s massive South-to-North Water Diversion project, created to relieve a water crisis in the country’s parched north by tapping its more water-rich south, has produced an unexpected outcome: many cities in north China aren’t using the water. The Wall Street Journal looks at why.
China orders the closure of small plants in 10 polluting industries and a curb on the tapping of aquifers in an effort to reign in contamination of its water supply. Probe International Fellow, activist and journalist Dai Qing is quoted for this article by the Financial Times.
On March 30, China’s National Development and Reform Commission ordered the immediate closure of 66 golf courses across the country — the first sign of follow-up on a 10-year moratorium on new courses that a report by Beijing Today describes as “an admission of the failure” of that ban. During the past decade, instead of declining, the number of golf courses on the Chinese mainland exploded from 178 in 2004 to 528 in 2013. How did that happen in the face of a government crackdown?
According to Beijing’s bid to hold the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, the environmental impact of the Games will be “ecofriendly” and “sustainable”. Experts say otherwise: providing snow for events will be tough in a city where “it just doesn’t snow” and “a Martian-like plan” will be needed to create artificial cover. Conservationists worry about moves to build Olympic ski resorts in national parks and protected nature reserves. Ski resorts, meanwhile, require water and lots of it but Beijing doesn’t have water.
Is the ultimate dome preventing China’s skies from clearing a political one?
Patricia Adams
Brady Yauch
Dai Qing
Fan Xiao
Lawrence Solomon
Mu Lan
Lisa Peryman
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