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Developer FivePoint has a new plan to reduce carbon emissions at its proposed $12.7 billion master-planned community in California's Los Angeles County after a court blocked the project on environmental grounds. The company hopes to begin construction in 2018 and will implement zero-net-energy construction when it builds the 21,500 homes, each of which will have a charging station for electric vehicle.

Bees, butterflies and other pollinators are increasingly under threat from human activities and countries must transform their agricultural practices to ensure global crop production can meet demand and avoid substantial economic losses, the United Nations Conference on Biological Diversity heard today. According to the global assessment on pollinators produced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 75 per cent of our food crops and nearly 90 per cent of wild flowering plants depend to some extent on animal pollination, which is the transfer of pollen between the male and female parts of flowers to enable fertilization and reproduction. Without pollinators, crops such as coffee, cacao and apples would drastically suffer, and changes in global crop supplies could increase prices to consumers and reduce profits to producers, resulting in a potential annual net loss of economic welfare of $160 billion to $191 billion globally.

A plan launched by Philadelphia City Council President Darrell Clarke and backed by the Philadelphia Energy Authority will use $1 billion on energy efficiency projects in municipal buildings, schools, small businesses and low- to middle-income homes with the goals of creating 10,000 green jobs over the next decade and reducing energy consumption. PEA's executive director, Emily Schapira, says green energy is a growing industry, and the project will spur its development in the city.

Ending food waste is a key concern across the Western world, with new initiatives cropping up almost every day. Now, a group of British companies and universities have won access to a £340 million EU innovation program aimed at changing the way we eat, grow and distribute food. The new project, called EIT Food, has ambitious aims to halve food waste in Europe within a decade and reduce diet-related illness diet by 2030. It has received €400 million (£340m) of EU research funding, matched by €1.2 billion (£1 billion) of funding from industry and other sources over seven years.

Furniture retailer IKEA sold its development and supply chain division to a group set up by founder Ingvar Kamprad, and it will invest $1.06 billion of the $5.5 billion sale proceeds in forests and recycling ventures, the company said. IKEA owns forests in the Baltic region and Romania, and it uses recyclable packaging.

Tunisia has set a goal to source 33% of its total electricity needs from renewables by 2030. Energy and Mines Minister Mongi Marzouk said Tunisia's installed renewable energy capacity would have to reach 16 gigawatts to meet that goal, requiring an investment of about $7 billion.

Consolidated Edison, the utility that provides New York City's electricity, faces higher demand for power than its existing infrastructure can supply. But instead of adding a substation, which would cost $1.2 billion or more, Con Ed will deploy a mix of distributed solar, fuel cells and efficiency measures that will cost about $200 million - less than one-fifth the price of a substation, reports Inside Climate News.

Global carbon markets' value will rise 15 percent this year to 46 billion euros ($63 billion), Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecasts.

Consumer demand, advances in material technology and legislation will push sustainable packaging to a $244 billion market by 2018, according to report by Smithers Para. The "Future of Sustainable Packaging to 2018" report found awareness among consumers is driving demand for sustainability, particularly packaging that has a smaller environmental footprint.

BCC Research reports the global market for anaerobic digestors and landfill gas equipment was estimated at nearly $4.5 billion for 2013. Its study, Waste-Derived Biogas: Global Markets for Anaerobic Digestion Equipment, projects the market to grow to $7 billion by 2018, and register a five-year compound annual growth rate of 9.4 percent 2013 to 2018.

US commercial buildings can collectively save up to 28 billion gallons of water annually by using a suit of tools produced by AT&T and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the organizations say.

Coca-Cola and its bottling partners are on track to meet their 2020 water replenishment goal by balancing an estimated 68 percent of the water used in their finished beverages based on 2013 sales volume. To date, the soft drink company has replenished an estimated 108.5 billion liters of water back to communities and nature through 509 community water projects in more than 100 countries

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

An estimated 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted each year, totaling $750 billion in economic losses, according to a 2013 report from the United Nations that analyzed loss of food around the world. France is looking to avoid such waste, becoming the first country to enact a law that bans grocery stores from wasting food.

Every year, the world produces more than two billion tons of waste - enough to fill a fleet of trash trucks to circle the world 24 times, according to sustainability project the World Counts. The World Bank estimates the yearly global cost of dealing with waste is more than $200 billion and predicts annual waste will exceed 11 million tons per day by 2100 if current trends continue.  But where does it all go? Whether it's an island built as a landfill or the outskirts of historic monuments, the world's waste is piling up with no end in sight. The following images offer an acute reminder of the seriousness of waste management and the desperate need to address it. It's simply not sustainable.

MGM Resorts has saved 2 billion gallons of water since embarking on current conservation efforts in 2008, sustainability chief Chris Brophy told the Nevada Drought Forum last week. Among the company's projects: water recycling technology to reduce waste at the Bellagio fountain show and at Cirque du Soleil's indoor water show. 

nvestors are expected to put at least $15 billion into India's wind industry by 2020, according to research firm CRISIL. The country is expected to add 4 gigawatts of installed wind energy capacity annually through 2020, said the report. The government has set a goal to increase its capacity by 60 GW by 2022

Earlier this month, the Narendra Modi government officially approved an incredibly ambitious plan for India's fledgling solar sector. From the current solar power generation capacity of 4 GW (gigawatt), it wants to produce as much as 100 GW by 2022-with a target of attracting a staggering $100 billion into the sector over the next seven years.

The report, Power Forward 2.0: How American Companies are Setting Clean Energy Targets and Capturing Greater Business Value, shows that clean energy is becoming mainstream for U.S. corporations - with 60 percent of the Fortune 100 having goals for renewable energy or greenhouse gas reductions. Through these initiatives, the 53 Fortune 100 companies reporting on climate and energy targets have collectively saved $1.1 billion annually and decreased their annual CO2 emissions by approximately 58.3 million metric tons - the equivalent of retiring 15 coal-fired power plants.