Fighting climate change means different things in different cities, as this snapshot illustrates:
VANCOUVER, CANADA
Environmentalism and tourism are intertwined in Vancouver, a city of 600,000 nestling between beautiful mountain peaks and the Pacific Ocean.
Photo: AFP
Since 2007, a swathe of green measures has cut CO2 emissions from buildings by 20 percent, landfill by 23 percent and road trips by 27 percent. The city has a vastly-expanded network of bike paths and two new rail transit lines.
The city last year set a target of 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. The province’s electricity supply is already 93 percent renewable, mostly hydro. Like other port cities around the world, Vancouver is faced with rising seas and more destructive storms as a result of climate change, for which it intends to revamp storm-water systems and management.
Forestry and mining remain the province’s major industries, but the city has made a big push to attract investment in less polluting sectors such as high-tech and film production.
CHONGQING, CHINA
A megapolis of 18 million people, Chongqing is a manufacturing hub for cars, motorcycles, steel, aluminum and many other heavy-industry goods.
Its citizens have gagged for decades on some of the foulest air in the world, made worse by a landscape of hill-lined basins that trap pollution.
Zhou Jie, a 28-year-old advertising industry worker, said she worries constantly about pollution and global warming.
“I would be very willing to switch to a low-emission and low-polluting lifestyle if the government asks us and is willing to subsidize it,” she said.
The giant municipality — whose administrative area covers 30 million people — has an ambitious program to encourage lower-carbon practices.
A buy-back program launched in 2013 has taken tens of thousands of high-polluting vehicles off the road. High-sulfur coal and diesel are banned within city limits.
Chongqing wants non-fossil fuels to be 15 percent of its energy mix by 2020. Beijing has promised China’s world-leading carbon emissions will peak by “around 2030.”
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Despite improvements, sprawling Los Angeles still has some of the most polluted air in the US.
But that status may change as California ramps up to enact among the most ambitious environmental policies in the world. Last September, Governor Jerry Brown — who calls climate change “the existential threat of our time” — approved legislation requiring the state to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.
The state also aims to generate 50 percent of its electricity from renewable resources — notably wind and solar energy — by 2030. Buildings are to become twice as energy efficient by the same date.
Three-quarters of all waste must be recycled by 2020.
As for Los Angeles, stricter fuel emissions standards for vehicles are bound to help. But there will be new challenges: temperatures in the sun-soaked city are expected to rise by 2.8 degrees Celsius by mid-century.
LAGOS, NIGERIA
Battered trucks and cars on the highways of Nigeria’s main commercial city spew black clouds of exhaust, while chronic electricity outages mean that most businesses and homes rely on gas-guzzling generators for power. The air often tastes of petrol.
Despite its exploding population of 20 million in a low-lying coastal area, Lagos has done little to adapt to future climate change.
“There is often a big gap between plan and implementation,” explained Ademola Omojola, an associate professor of geography at the University of Lagos. “The capacity to manage it at the local level isn’t there.”
With limited green energy options, people are forced to rely on fossil fuels. With government corruption endemic, the private sector may be better placed to adapt to climate change.
A privately managed city for half a million people, for example, is under development on 10km2 of reclaimed land jutting out into the Atlantic.
Dubbed the “Dubai of Africa,” Eko Atlantic boasts an eight-kilometer-long wall designed to prevent the ocean from eating away the Lagos coastline, and thousands of homes with it.
But the project — far too expensive for most of Lagos’ inhabitants — has been tarred as a “climate apartheid.”
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s