Group items tagged

Fleeing China (an article about voluntary migration of wealthy Chinese)

Amazing case study for the effects of internal migration in China. 

'Brown Clouds' Are World's Newest Environmental Threat By TINI TRAN AND JOHN HEILPRIN / AP WRITER Friday, November 14, 2008 BEIJING - A dirty brown haze sometimes more than a mile thick is darkening skies not only over vast areas of Asia, but also in the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, changing weather patterns and threatening health and food supplies, the UN reported. The huge smog-like plumes, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and firewood, are known as "atmospheric brown clouds." Cars drive through thick smog on a street in Beijing in September 2008. Enormous brown clouds of pollution hanging over Asia are killing hundreds of thousands of people, melting glaciers, changing weather patterns and damaging crops, the United Nations said. (Photo: AFP) When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth's atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, according to a report commissioned by the UN Environment Program and released Thursday. "All of these points to an even greater and urgent need to look at emissions across the planet," said Achim Steiner, head of Kenya-based UNEP, which funded the report with backing from Italy, Sweden and the United States. Brown clouds are caused by an unhealthy mix of particles, ozone and other chemicals that come from cars, coal-fired power plants, burning fields and wood-burning stoves. First identified by the report's lead researcher in 1990, the clouds were depicted Thursday as being more widespread and causing more environmental damage than previously known. Perhaps most widely recognized as the haze this past summer over Beijing's Olympics, the clouds have been found to be more than a mile (kilometer) thick around glaciers in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountain ranges. They hide the sun and absorb radiation, leading to new worries not only about global climate change but also about extreme weather conditions. "All t

I wanted to alert you to an excellent source that would fall directly under the new IB syllabus for Patterns in Env Quality and Sustainability.  When asking for a case study on sustainable management strategies, I'm using China's Loess Plateau.  There is an excellent film (on youtube and on the website) of a watershed rehabilitation project that has been incredibly successful.  This case study connects concepts of soil erosion, watersheds, climate change, and the social/econ and environmental consequences of this World Bank/Chinese gov't project.

high-powered group of senior Republicans and Democrats led two missions to China in the final months of the Bush administration for secret backchannel negotiations aimed at securing a deal on joint US-Chinese action on climate change, the Guardian has learned.

Guangzhou, China - African migrants have been arriving in Guangzhou, China's third largest city ever since the Chinese economic boom began in the late 1990s.  Current estimates put their numbers anywhere from 20,000 to 200,000. The latter figure would place their population at almost two percent of Guangzhou's 13 million residents. In any event, Guangzhou's Africans constitute Asia's largest African community. The majority of them reside in a 10 square kilometre area in the central districts of Yuexiu and Baiyun locally known as "Chocolate City".

Family-planning officials say their research indicates that 70% of women want to have two babies or more.