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The US and Japan pledged a total of $4.5 billion to the Green Climate Fund over the weekend, with $3 billion from the US and $1.5 billion from Japan to help poor nations curb greenhouse gas emissions and limit climate change.

These small-scale fishermen in southern Japan are up against an industrial fishing juggernaut that is rapidly depleting stocks of Pacific bluefin tuna. A prime culprit behind the crisis, the Iki fishermen said, is a high-tech Japanese fishing armada that mines the waters northeast of Iki where Pacific bluefin tuna congregate to spawn. For the past 11 years, convoys of boats have waited in the Sea of Japan for these fish to gather, then used sonar tracking devices and huge purse seine nets to scoop them up by the thousands and sell them to global seafood giants such as Nippon Suisan Kaisha and Maruha Nichiro Corporation.

Developers in Japan built too many golf courses during a recent real estate boom, and now some of the under-used facilities are being converted into solar farms, with hundreds of thousands of solar panels lining former fairways and putting greens. Similar strategies are being considered in the U.S. as interest in the sport wanes

Revised government figures in Japan showed that greenhouse gas emissions were the second-highest on record for the year ended March 2014, with a total of 1.552 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. The record emissions level was set in 2007 at 1.556 billion tons. Japan's 48 nuclear reactors provided 26% of the country's electricity in the past, but all have been shut down since September 2013

According to Greenpeace, the fish that sushi restaurants rely upon for their high-priced sashimi dishes is now endangered. Sixty percent of the world's tuna stocks is now harvested from the Pacific Ocean, and bluefin prized for its delicate meat fills a substantial demand in Japan. More than 70 percent of the bluefin that is caught ends up in Japan.

Japanese scientists are preparing to launch a satellite that will use a 300-meter electromagnetic tether to snag orbiting trash left over from past satellites and space missions. The magnetic field will slow the trash, causing it to gradually fall closer to Earth and eventually burn up in the atmosphere. It's thought there are tens of millions of trash fragments in orbit around the Earth.

Rising incomes and high demand for electric and electronic equipment (EEE) in East and South-East Asian countries have resulted in e-waste generation increasing by two thirds during 2010-2015, says a new study published by the United Nations University (UNU). The average increase in e-waste across 12 countries analysed - Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam - was over 60 per cent during the five-year period totalling 12.3 million tonnes.

China may lead the renewable energy race and is projected to add more renewable energy facilities than the combined efforts from the U.S., EU and Japan through 2035, according to a report from the International Energy Agency. The report also projected that the share of hydropower, biomass, wind and solar energy in the world's supply will surpass 30% in two decades. Advances in solar and wind power technology will help increase output in these sectors by 45%.

Efforts to clean up ocean waste have been stymied by the sheer size of the areas in which plastic is concentrated. Traditional cleanup methods using vessels and nets to collect plastic are too expensive and time-consuming to work. For a job as arduous as this, some disruptive innovation is needed, and 20-year-old Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat claims he has created just that. The Ocean Cleanup will passively collect plastic debris in the waters between Japan and South Korea. 

Electric car manufacturer Tesla has revealed a battery for the home that can store power from solar panels, be used in case of a power outage and potentially transition solar-powered homes to be off the grid entirely. "The goal is complete transformation of the entire energy infrastructure of the world, to completely sustainable zero carbon," said the company's founder, Elon Musk.