Hong Kong Ivory Trade Called Major Threat to Elephants

Image Credit: THINKSTOCK

Hong Kong’s booming ivory market is helping push elephants toward extinction, conservationists said Thursday, reporting more ivory items on sale there than in any other city.

The sale of ivory items from government-registered stockpiles predating the 1989 ban is legal for domestic use in Hong Kong, but a report by Save the Elephants found tusks from recently slaughtered elephants were being passed off as old ivory, and that this ivory was being bought and then illegally smuggled to mainland China on a huge scale.

“Hong Kong’s ivory trade is creating a significant loophole in international efforts to end the killing of elephants in Africa,” said the report released in Kenya and Hong Kong.

“No other city surveyed has so many pieces of ivory on sale as Hong Kong,” report co-author Esmond Martin said.

The report found more than 30,800 items — mainly jewellery and figurines — for sale in 72 stores and estimated that over 90 percent of sales were to buyers from mainland China, where demand for ivory is high.

Hong Kong’s low taxes make ivory cheaper than on the Chinese mainland.

The report said lax border controls and the sheer volume of people crossing each year abetted the trade, which was having a major impact on efforts to end elephant poaching in Africa.

“A mass slaughtering of African elephants is underway, yet the Hong Kong government is turning a blind eye,” said Alex Hofford of campaign group WildAid.

“For 25 years since the international ban, Hong Kong’s ivory traders appear to have been laundering poached ivory from illegally-killed elephants into their stocks,” said Hofford.

The report described Hong Kong as the world’s third-largest ivory smuggling hub after Kenya and Tanzania.

However, a spokeswoman for Hong Kong’s agriculture, fisheries and conservation department disputed the report and said there was “no plan” to ban the island’s ivory trade.

Read Full Article: Discovery News

Putting a Stop to the Consumption of Shark Fin Soup

The Confederate flag. Donald Trump’s rants during campaign season. Shark fin soup. Not all traditions should be continued.

Shark fin soup originated during the Sung Dynasty (960-1279), but it wasn’t until the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) that the dish became popular amongst the aristocracy. The tradition fell out of favor in 1949, when the Communist Party came into power, but re-emerged as a trend during the last two decades. Shark fins are considered a luxury item and recently have become popular with China’s emerging middle class. Serving the soup can be a status symbol or a way to show respect, and it is commonly served at formal banquets, weddings, and other festive occasions.

Although the fin itself is tasteless, it’s valued for its texture, a critical component in Chinese cuisine. Since shipping vessels often have limited space and shark bodies aren’t lucrative, sharks are often definned and discarded into the ocean to slowly die. Obtaining reliable information is challenging, but it’s estimated that between 26-73 million sharks are traded annually through fin markets. Several species risk extinction and their decline in population may have negative consequences for many marine ecosystems.

The consumption of shark fin soup could harm more than just the environment; it may have an adverse effect on human neurological health. A study published in the journal Marine Drugs found the neurotoxic amino acid β-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA) present in shark fins.

Deborah C. Mash is a researcher at the University of Miami and lead author of the study. She explains, “Sharks are apex predators that are long-lived. They accumulate mercury and BMAA which act synergistically as neurotoxins.”

The researchers tested fin clips from seven different shark species and detected elevated levels of BMAA in all of the samples. As Mash explains, the consumption of shark fin soup (as well as cartilage pills) could pose a significant health risk since BMAA is implicated in degenerative brain diseases including Lou Gehrig’s Disease and Alzheimer’s.

Although shark fin soup is considered a tradition, culture is not static and it can change from generation to generation. A recent report by WildAid, a San Francisco based environmental organization, suggests there may be a decline in consumption of shark fins. The study found that efforts such as media campaigns aimed at educating the public have had a positive impact.

Read Full Article: Scientific American 

NASA Photos Show China’s Plan to Meet New UN Climate Pledge

Image Credit: JESSE ALLEN, NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY

NASA satellites show part of China’s plan to meet its ambitious new UN pledge to cut carbon emissions: solar power.

On Tuesday, China said it would halt the rise in its heat-trapping emissions within 15 years and would boost its share of non-fossil fuel energy use to 20 percent by 2030. Its commitment, similar to the one it made last year in a joint U.S. agreement, comes ahead of UN climate talks in Paris in December.

China’s goal reflects how quickly it’s becoming the world’s leader in solar power. It produces two-thirds of all solar panels, and last year, it added more solar capacity than any other country, according to the International Energy Agency or IEA. Germany still has the most cumulative photovoltaic capacity, but second-place China will likely soon close the gap.

The Gobi Desert reveals why. In the northwestern Gansu Province, where sunlight and land are abundant, construction began nearly six years ago on the country’s first large-scale solar power station.

Recent photos from NASA satellites show that solar panels now cover about three times as much Gobi land as they did three years ago. In 2014, the IEA says, China boosted its capacity from solar panels by 37 percent to reach a total capacity of 28.1 gigawatts. And in 2015, during the first quarter alone, China says it’s added another 5 gigawatts of solar capacity.

China’s spending big on renewable energy. Last year, it invested far more— a record $83.3 billion, up 39% from 2013—than any other country, according to a March report by the UN Environment Programme. The U.S., in second place, invested less than half as much.

Not surprisingly, China’s posted the largest gains worldwide in power generation from renewables, including solar, reports the most recent BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

“China is largely motivated by its strong national interests to tackle persistent air pollution problems, limit climate impacts and expand its renewable energy job force,” says Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute. She says China, now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, can meet its climate pledge if it continues its renewables’ push.

“China will work hard to achieve the target at an even earlier date” than 2030, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said in a statement, according to Reuters.

Read Full Article: National Geographic

Conservationists: New China policy could save elephants

Image Credit: VOA

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Conservationists hail it as a possible game-changer in the struggle to curb the slaughter of elephants: an unexpected pledge by a senior Chinese official to stop the ivory trade in a country whose vast, increasingly affluent consumer market drives elephant poaching across Africa.

Now they are waiting in suspense for China to outline how and when it would ban an industry that criminal syndicates use as cover for their illicit business in tusks.

The ban could happen in 2017 when a legal stockpile of ivory in China is possibly depleted, predicted Zhou Fei, head of the China office of TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring organization. He said he is encouraged by the political will of China’s top leadership to combat poaching that, by some estimates, has killed more than 100,000 African elephants in the past several years and prompted governments to publicly destroy confiscated ivory in major cities, including New York City last week.

The May 29 comment by Zhao Shucong, head of China’s State Forestry Administration, came at a Beijing event in which 1,455 pounds (660 kilograms) of ivory were crushed, rendering tusks, carved statues and other ornaments useless for sale.

“Under the legal framework of CITES and domestic laws and regulations, we will strictly control ivory processing and trade until the commercial processing and sale of ivory and its products are eventually halted,” Zhao said in an English-language translation of his speech that was provided by his office.

CITES is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which seeks to regulate the multi-billion dollar trade in wild animals and plants. China allows trade in ivory acquired before a 1989 CITES ban and from a onetime, CITES-approved purchase by China and Japan of an ivory stockpile from several African countries in 2008. Conservation groups say China’s illegal trade has since flourished.

“The fact that China is now talking about shutting down its own market could be huge,” Ginette Hemley, senior vice president of wildlife conservation at the World Wildlife Fund, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Hemley said, though, that a total ban was not “something that can happen overnight” and that it should be implemented carefully to prevent criminal groups funneling as much ivory as possible through the legal system before it ends.

In his speech, Zhao referred to an ivory trade ban as the seventh of 10 “major measures” on wildlife conservation, including tougher law enforcement and publicity campaigns aimed at Chinese abroad. The State Forestry Administration has relatively limited resources and would require the support of multiple Chinese government agencies to enforce a ban.

China has backed an ivory-carving industry as part of its cultural heritage, and Zhao did not say whether that industry, a valuable source of jobs, would also end.

In an email to the AP, Zhou of TRAFFIC China said he is confident about his 2017 prediction because he heard more encouraging comments from Zhao at a meeting last week on an anti-poaching operation dubbed Cobra III that netted several hundred arrests across Asia, Africa and Europe. Zhou said other factors influencing China as it considers an ivory trade ban are international pressure and “the benefit of legal trade vs damage of illegal trade to China.”

In February, China announced a one-year ban on ivory imports. Pan Peng, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Embassy in South Africa, described the step as an “experimental approach” to gauge its effectiveness in countering the illegal trade. China has also said it cannot singlehandedly act against the ivory trade and wants more robust action from other countries.

Thailand is a major consumer market for ivory, and conservation groups have urged the United States to close legal loopholes that they allege allow illegal ivory to enter the country under the guise of limited, legal trade.

Peter Knights, executive director of San Francisco-based WildAid, said he believes that China is still trying to figure out the best way to implement an ivory ban.

Read Full Article: AP

Why China warned the US to stay away

A group of islands in the South China Sea may not sound particularly significant, but these recently-formed pieces of land could be the key to Beijing’s future military strategy.

I suspect that until a few weeks ago the South China Sea was not a place most people around the world gave much thought to, or any thought at all. The Spratly Islands even less so. Unless you are a China geek you’ve probably hardly heard of them. But google Spratly islands today and you will find a sudden deluge of articles, all proclaiming the same sort of sentiment: “China and the US are on a collision course and it could end in war!”

Could it? Probably not, not anytime soon anyway. But what’s going on in the South China Sea is still very significant.

This of course is all about China, or rather China’s intentions.

For the best part of two millennia China was the dominant power in Asia. But then along came European expansion and the industrial revolution and the arrival on China’s shores of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and of course eventually the British. China was brought to its knees, carved up, its palaces burned, its people hooked on opium supplied by Britain. Then came a revolution, a civil war, a world war, another revolution and 30 years of Maoist madness.

Now, finally, is China emerging from those two centuries of chaos. It is once again wealthy, united and strong. None of us really knows what that will mean. One reason is that China’s secretive Communist Party leadership never tells anybody its intentions.

And so we are left to read the “China tea leaves”, look at what China is doing and try to work out its intentions.

And so that brings me to the South China Sea. The southern part of it, close to the Philippines, is dotted with treacherous coral reefs, rocks and sandbars. Only a handful are big enough to be called islands. China, Vietnam and the Philippines have been quarrelling over who owns them for decades. But last year there was a sudden and dramatic change.

Aerial photos taken by the Philippine navy showed a fleet of dredgers anchored off one of the Chinese-controlled reefs. They were seen pumping millions of tonnes of material on to the reefs to form an artificial island.

A media frenzy ensued in which I played my own small part. I think I have a fair claim to being the first Western journalist to see the strange new Chinese islands with my own eyes. Last July I set out on a Filipino fishing boat to try to find them. One morning, ploughing through a heavy swell 300 nautical miles off the Philippine coast, we suddenly saw land ahead where my chart said there shouldn’t have been any. Even the latest Philippine navy flights had not detected any work on this particular reef. But there it was – a brand new, yellowish piece of land at a place called Gaven Reef.

This year China’s work on the islands has accelerated dramatically. More than 2,000 acres of new land has been created on six reefs. In April fresh photos showed the outlines of a runway beginning to be laid on one.

So what is China up to? Some pro-Beijing scholars have tried to claim the islands are for both military and civilian use. There will be lighthouses and shelters for fishermen they say.

Well maybe, but Beijing is not spending billions of dollars on huge land reclamation hundreds of miles from its own coast to help fishermen. These islands are military and strategic. China is alone in claiming the whole of the South China Sea. Now it is creating “facts on the ground”. That runway is not for tourist flights.

A few weeks ago a US surveillance plane deliberately flew close to the new islands. The crew recorded the immediate and angry Chinese response.

“Foreign military aircraft, this is Chinese navy,” the operator announced, “You are approaching our military alert zone. Leave immediately!” The warning was repeated with growing irritation until the radio operator was left spluttering, “You go!”

Read Full Article: BBC News

India, China need cleaner air just to keep death rate steady

Image Credit: AP Photo/Altaf Qadri

NEW DELHI (AP) — Never mind lowering the rate of death from air pollution in India and China. Just keeping those rates steady will demand urgent action to clear the skies, according to a report published Tuesday.

The findings — gleaned from a new global model for how changes in outdoor air pollution could translate into changes in disease rates — highlight a demographic quirk of Asia’s two fastest-growing economies, where young populations have so far kept pollution-related mortality relatively low even amid breakneck economic development at steep environmental cost.

Both countries have looked to coal-fired power plants to boost electricity and fuel growth. Both have seen explosions in the number of vehicles on the roads. And both have hundreds of millions of impoverished people still relying on burning wood, kerosene or whatever they can grab at the garbage dump to build fires for cooking or keeping warm on winter nights.

But as their populations age, more people will become susceptible to conditions such as heart disease, cancer or stroke that are caused or exacerbated by air pollution. Already, Asian nations led by India and China account for 72 percent of the total 3.7 million annual deaths from outdoor air pollution — more than AIDS and malaria combined.

Neither nation is anywhere near meeting air quality guidelines set by the World Health Organization. In India, pollution levels are still on the rise.

“The impact of particulate air pollution on preventable deaths is far larger than most people realize,” said Howard Frumkin, dean of the University of Washington’s School of Public Health and an environmental health specialist who was not involved in the study.

In fact, if the entire world brought pollution levels down to WHO recommended levels, 2.1 million premature deaths could be prevented each year, according to the study, which was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

India and China would need to reduce average levels of tiny, inhalable particulate matter called PM 2.5 by 20 to 30 percent merely to offset their demographic changes and keep mortality rates steady, the study shows. That still won’t get them to the WHO’s recommendation of 10 micrograms per cubic meter, but it could help avoid several hundred thousand premature deaths every year.

“The opportunity for preventing premature deaths by cleaning up the air is enormous … especially in China and India, where pollution levels are high and the exposed populations large and densely concentrated,” Frumkin said.

Actually reducing pollution-related mortality in China, India and other countries with extreme pollution would require major action. Cutting mortality in half, for example, would take an average 68 percent reduction in PM 2.5 from 2010 levels, according to the study. If pollution levels were to remain stable, Indian mortality would go up 21 percent and China’s 23 percent.

“These populations are getting older, and the diseases that air pollution affects will become more important,” said the study’s lead author, Josh Apte, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at the University of Texas, Austin.

The study — one of the first to tackle the question of how much cleaner a country’s air needs to be to reduce premature mortality — combines global satellite pollution data, ground pollution measures, population statistics and globally recognized mortality rates for five key diseases for which air pollution is a risk factor in order to calculate the potential benefits from hitting certain pollution-reduction targets.

The WHO last month declared air pollution the world’s largest single environmental health risk, and pledged to come up with a global plan to start cleaning up the skies within a year. Ultimately, though, it will be up to national governments to act.

While Asia’s developing countries are considered today’s big air polluters, the global mortality study shows that even less-polluted Western nations could collectively save up to a half-million people from premature death each year by cutting PM 2.5 concentrations by 25 percent.

“Everybody thinks that the air in the West is fine. But there are relatively large health benefits that can be found from further cleaning the air in already clean locations,” said Julian Marshall, a co-author and associate professor of environmental engineering at the University of Minnesota. “It’s a reminder that there still are health effects from air pollution” even at low levels.

“In cleaner parts of the world, air pollution still has a significant toll, but it is hard to visualize,” said Bert Brunekreef, director of the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. “On death certificates, nobody mentions air pollution as a cause of death.”

Both India and China have recently toughened their PM 2.5 standards, though neither reliably meets those limits. India has 13 cities listed in the world’s 20 most polluted. Another three are in neighboring Pakistan, and two in Bangladesh.

China, once the world’s poster child for air pollution, is much further along in clearing its air, with sophisticated air monitoring that warns of hazardous days, during which schools may be closed, industries shut down and government vehicles taken off the roads.

India has no such emergency protocols. Anti-pollution laws remain widely ignored and unenforced. Its fledgling air quality index covers only a few cities with a patchy network of monitors that are often on the fritz.

Experts said the global mortality study offers important insights and warnings too often ignored, even if its conclusions are generalized and it doesn’t consider other related mortality causes, like smoking or indoor soot from cooking stoves.

Read Full Article: AP

China’s Troubling Robot Revolution

Image Credit: Kristian Hammerstad

OVER the last decade, China has become, in the eyes of much of the world, a job-eating monster, consuming entire industries with its seemingly limitless supply of low-wage workers. But the reality is that China is now shifting its appetite to robots, a transition that will have significant consequences for China’s economy — and the world’s.

In 2014, Chinese factories accounted for about a quarter of the global ranks of industrial robots — a 54 percent increase over 2013. According to the International Federation of Robotics, it will have more installed manufacturing robots than any other country by 2017.

Midea, a leading manufacturer of home appliances in the heavily industrialized province of Guangdong, plans to replace 6,000 workers in its residential air-conditioning division, about a fifth of the work force, with automation by the end of the year. Foxconn, which makes consumer electronics for Apple and other companies, plans to automate about 70 percent of factory work within three years, and already has a fully robotic factory in Chengdu.

Chinese factory jobs may thus be poised to evaporate at an even faster pace than has been the case in the United States and other developed countries. That may make it significantly more difficult for China to address one of its paramount economic challenges: the need to rebalance its economy so that domestic consumption plays a far more significant role than is currently the case.

China’s economic growth has been driven not just by manufacturing exports, but also by fixed investment in things like housing, factories and infrastructure — in fact, in recent years investment has made up nearly half of its gross domestic product. Meanwhile, domestic consumer spending represents only about a third of the economic pie, or roughly half the level in the United States.

This is clearly unsustainable. After all, there eventually has to be a return on all those investments. Factories have to produce goods that are profitably sold. Homes have to be occupied, and rent has to be paid. Generating those returns will require Chinese households to step up and play a larger role: They will have to spend far more, not just on the goods produced in China’s factories, but increasingly in the service sector.

Making that happen will be an extraordinary challenge. Indeed, the Chinese leadership has been talking about it for years, but virtually no progress has been made. One problem is that even in the wake of recent wage increases, average Chinese households simply have too little income relative to the size of the economy.

Another problem is that the Chinese public has an extraordinary propensity to save. By some estimates, the average household socks away as much as 40 percent of its income. That may be partly driven by the need to provide for retirement and self-insure against risks like unemployment and illness, as China’s newly capitalistic economy has largely decimated the social safety net.

The bottom line is that any policy designed to rebalance economic growth will have to raise household incomes while dampening down the saving rate. That would be a daunting challenge under any circumstances, but accelerating technology is virtually certain to make it far more difficult.

The traditional path followed by developed countries has been to first raise incomes and build a solid middle class on the basis of manufacturing, and then later to make the transition to a service economy. The United States, and later, countries like Japan and South Korea, had the luxury of undertaking that journey at a time when technology was far less advanced. China is faced with making a similar transition in the robotic age.

Automation has already had a substantial impact on Chinese factory employment: Between 1995 and 2002 about 16 million factory jobs disappeared, roughly 15 percent of total Chinese manufacturing employment. This trend is poised to accelerate.

Read Full Article: The New York Times

Jack Ma: World War III is coming, but in a good way

Image Credit: CNBC

World War III is coming, but it will be a good thing, according to one of Asia’s richest men.

Jack Ma , founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA), said Tuesday that the Internet and its various platforms will usher in a wave of global conflict. It will not, however, pit countries against each other, but instead will see the likes of China and the U.S. teaming up to defeat societal ills.

“The third world war is going to happen, and this war is not between nations,” Ma said during a speech hosted by the Economic Club of New York. “In this war we work together against the disease, the poverty, the climate change-and I believe this is our future.”

Ma said working to incite such a conflict is his life’s passion, and Alibaba’s mission of globalizing e-commerce can help.

“It’s not about the money, it’s about the dreams,” he said of the Internet’s future.

Alibaba, the massive Chinese e-commerce firm, is working to expand its international presence, and Ma is touring the U.S. this week to pitch his platform to American businesses. Although some have suggested it could potentially bring its marketplace to the U.S. as a direct competitor to the likes of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), others remain skeptical that such a move could work.

Ma, however, emphasized that his company is not analogous to Jeff Bezos’ Internet giant.

“From the American point of view, Amazon probably is the only business model for e-commerce, but no, we are different,” he said, explaining that Alibaba does not buy, sell or even deliver products-nor does it have any inventory or warehouses.

Instead, Ma pitched Alibaba as a way for small businesses to find success in the global digital marketplace, and he called for American firms to get involved.

“We show great respect for eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) and Amazon, but I think the opportunity and the strategy for us is helping small business in America go to China, sell their products in China,” he said, adding that the Chinese middle class is already about the size of the American population, and it continues to grow.

Ma said Alibaba’s new tactic will present just as much of an opportunity for Americans looking to expand their customer bases as it does for his own attempts at building a global empire.

“China has been focused on exporting for the past 20 years, and I think in the next 10-20 years China should be focusing on importing. China should learn to buy, China should spend the money, China should buy a lot of its things globally,” he said. “And I think that American small business, American-branded products, should use the Internet and go to China.”

Ma focused squarely on e-commerce during his Tuesday address, but his company has other important irons in the fire. Alibaba struck a number of deals to bring its cloud computing operations to the world-a challenge to not only Amazon, but also Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL)and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).

Read Full Article: Yahoo News

60% of China’s underground water ‘not fit for human contact’ – Beijing

Image Credit: Reuters/William Hong

About 60 percent of underground water in China, and one-third of its surface water, have been rated unfit for human contact last year, according to the environment ministry in Beijing.

The ministry said in a statement that water quality is getting worse, and the ministry classified 61.5 percent of underground water at nearly 5,000 monitoring sites as “relatively poor” or “very poor.” In 2013, the figure stood at 59.6 percent.

The fact that the water is unfit for human contact means that it can only be used for industrial purposes or irrigation.
The water supplies are classified into six grades, with only 3.4 percent of 968 monitoring sites of surface water meeting the highest “Grade I” standard.

A total of 63.1 percent was reported to be suitable for human use, rated “Grade III” or above.

China is currently carrying out a “war on pollution” campaign, to deal with environmental issues.

In particular, in April, the government in Beijing pledged to increase the percentage of good quality water sources up to 70 percent in seven main river basins, and to more than 93 percent in urban drinking supplies, by 2020.

Also, a prohibition on water-polluting plants in industries – such as oil refining and paper production – is set to come into effect by the end of 2016.

Air pollution also remains one of the most serious issues in China, the ministry said in its statement.

Just 16 of the 161 major Chinese cities satisfied the national standard for clean air in 2014, statistics demonstrated, local news agencies reported.

The other 145 cities – over 90 percent all in all – failed to meet the requirements.

Also, acid rain was detected in about 30 percent out of 470 cities.

Read Full Article: RT

Will China’s New Ivory Controls Make a Difference?

Image Credit: International Business Times

“Like a funeral for elephants.” That’s how Lishu Li, who works on the wildlife trade programme for the Wildlife Conservation Society China in Beijing, described the crushing of over 650 kilograms of confiscated illegal ivory last week. It was “quite dusty”, he said. “I think I inhaled a lot of ivory.” The crush, on May 29, came with a dramatic twist: at the same time Zhao Shucong, head of the State Forestry Administration, announced new controls on the country’s legal ivory trade.

China’s legal trade has been linked to the illegal trade in ivory, which has driven a surge in poaching in Africa. So conservation groups have hailed Zhao’s statement as a potential game changer. Nature asks what these controls will actually achieve.

Is there now a ban on the ivory trade in China?
It is not clear cut. Zhao said in his announcement: “We will strictly control ivory processing and trade until the commercial processing and sale of ivory and its products are eventually halted.”

He noted that the legal trade would be restricted, but did not use the word ‘ban’. Nor did he give any sort of timeline, explains Li, who added that in one scenario, ivory could still be carved at government-approved education and cultural centres. In this case, the products would go only to museums, rather than to retailers.

But Zhou Fei, head of wildlife trade monitoring organization Traffic China, thinks it will be “a total ban” that will happen “around 2017 when China’s legal ivory stockpile will be gone”.

Why is China of such interest to elephant conservation?
A handful of other countries, notably Thailand, are listed as countries of “primary concern” by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) — the body that regulates trade in endangered and potentially endangered animals and plants. But most observers assume that it is China’s black market that has largely driven the huge rise in African poaching over the past decade.

The ivory trade in China seemed to be dying out at the turn of this century, but in 2002, state and local governments started promoting the country’s cultural heritage. After 2006, this included ivory carving and the ivory market, and came just as a new, wealthy middle class emerged in the country. Prices for ivory — and demand — surged.

Researchers have shown a correlation between the rise in the number of animals poached and the number of items traded in China’s auction markets. And there have been large seizures of illegal ivory in the country, including 12,000 kilograms of ivory in November 2013 in Xiamen. Some of this seizure came from Tanzania — which yesterday announced a decline in elephant numbers from 109,051 in 2009 to 43,330 in 2014.

What is the relationship between the legal and illegal markets?
Licensed retailers in China can sell ivory that was acquired before a 1989 CITES trade ban, or material obtained through ‘approved’ purchases made since then. This includes China’s one-off purchase of a stockpile of 62 tons of ivory, imported with CITES approval in an unusual ‘one-off sale’ in March 2009. But a large increase over the past decade in licensed ‘white market’ processing factories and retail outlets has been matched by a growing black market for ivory in retail shops and online. And the black market gets mixed in with the white. According to a 2011 survey by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, nearly 60% of licensed retailers violated the terms of their licences, often by selling illegally poached ivory.

“The fact that any legal trade exists provides an easy loophole for sellers to sell new material, and prevents and disempowers reporting of any infringement of regulations — thereby permitting the sale of further ivory, pangolin and other materials,” says Alice Hughes, a conservationist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in Yunnan.

Will Zhao’s announcement make a difference?
China has already taken a variety of measures to restrict the illegal ivory trade. These include shutting down licensed traders found to be operating illegally, arresting an increasing number of smugglers, and limiting online sales that use other terms for ivory — such as “high quality white plastic” or “jelly material” — to circumvent monitoring. The government has also enlisted celebrities such as film star Jackie Chan and basketball hero Yao Ming, who have appeared in commercials to demean the illegal trade of ivory.

Read Full Article: Scientific American

Can China’s top-down approach fix its environmental crisis?

Image Credit: China Stringer Network/Reuters

China has the largest and one of the most dynamic clean tech sectors in the world. The close to $90bn invested in clean tech last year puts it well ahead of both the EU and the US. For all the recent troubles of companies such as Hanergy, China has some of the world’s largest solar, wind and other green tech companies. As growth slows in western markets, they are increasingly looking for business at home.

There is good reason for this too. China burns almost half the coal in the world, and accounts for 30% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions each year. Emissions from coal plants in China are responsible for a quarter of a million premature deaths a year.

China’s leaders know that they have a problem. They know that time is running out on the “get dirty, get rich, get clean” strategy pursued by the west. The bill for its environmental degradation is too high for its own people.

“Environmental pollution is a blight on people’s quality of life and a trouble that weighs on their hearts,” premier Li Keqiang told the opening of the National People’s Congress in March. The more than 300 million Chinese who downloaded the anti-pollution documentary Under the Dome in the weeks running up to Li’s speech (before censors scrubbed it from the internet) underscored the premier’s point.

The question is no longer whether China can afford to clean up the environment. Now the Chinese are asking: “can we afford not to clean up the environment?”

China’s top-down approach

Recent years have seen increasingly ambitious promises, matched with equally ambitious programmes. China has the world’s largest base of installed wind power in the world, most of it built by domestic companies. Goldwind, a company started by a former teacher who grew up in the far-western desert province of Xinjiang, is the world’s second-largest wind turbine maker, trailing only Denmark’s Vestas.

Five years ago China had almost no domestic solar power, preferring instead to export almost all of its production. This year China’s solar capacity at home is expected to outstrip Germany’s and become the world’s largest. By 2020 solar power will triple to 100 gigawatts of capacity, more than the total from all electricity-generating sources in the UK today. Chinese companies make up many of the 10 largest solar manufacturers in the world today and account for almost all of the domestic installations.

In November, President Xi Jinping announced in a historic agreement with Barack Obama that China’s emissions would peak around 2030, the first time a senior Chinese official has talked about a peak.

China’s top-down engineering-oriented approach means that it can set big goals and reach them. But the approach has its limits. Although China has more wind capacity than the US, it generates less electricity from wind. That’s partly because some of China’s wind turbines were built to curry political favour – they were seen as contributing to the greening of China, rather than generating electricity most efficiently.

Some of the best-intentioned turbine developers have had long delays in getting connected to the power grid, and even when turbines are hooked up to the grid their power often isn’t used – grid operators sometimes still dispatch power from the coal-fired power plants that produce about two-thirds of China’s electricity. This so-called curtailment cost 8% of power (pdf) last year, according to theGlobal Wind Energy Council.

The limits of government

China’s squandered opportunity with green buildings shows the limits of this government-directed approach in a country with little in the way of independent voices and a tendency to ignore directives from on high. Buildings are responsible for between one-third and one-half of all electricity use globally, with the figure towards the high end when the energy used to make cement, glass and steel for buildings is added to the electrical cost of running them.

Most Chinese buildings continue to be woefully inefficient, even though it is about four times cheaper over the life of a building to build an energy-efficient structure than it is to build and operate the coal-fired electricity plant needed to heat, cool, and light the inefficient building.

Developers would rather build a cheap building and sell it on, leaving society to pay the financial, as well as the environmental costs. As China’s torrid real estate market slows down, and more developers choose to hold on to their properties for the long-term, there’s likely to be more focus on building and operating to higher standards. Some companies are already doing this but in the absence of the transparency and accountability that goes with a vibrant civil society and a free media, it’s hard to tell just how much progress is being made.

Read Full Article: The Guardian

Activists: Decline of elephants in Tanzania is catastrophic

Image Credit: AP Photo/Mosa’ab Elshamy, File

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The sharp decline of the elephant population in Tanzania, most likely due to poaching, is catastrophic, a wildlife conservation group said Tuesday.

The Tanzanian government on Monday estimated that 65,721 elephants have died in the country in the last five years. The report showed the number of Tanzanian elephants plummeting from an estimated 109,051 in 2009 to 43,330 in 2014.

Steve Broad, the executive directors of wildlife conservation group TRAFFIC, said it is incredible that poaching on such an industrial scale had not been identified and addressed.

The statistics back concerns by TRAFFIC in a 2013 report that the Tanzanian ports of Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar have become main exit points for vast amounts of ivory, the group said in a statement.

According to the conservation group, at least 45 tons of ivory have flowed from Tanzania to international markets in Asia since 2009.

It said a breakdown across the country showed some smaller elephant populations had increased, notably that in the famed Serengeti region, which rose from 3,068 to 6,087 animals. However, beyond the most heavily visited tourist locations, elephant numbers were significantly down.

Of particular concern is the Ruaha-Rungwa ecosystem, where only 8,272 elephants remained in 2014, compared to 34,664 in 2009, according to government figures, the statement said.

“Tanzania has been hemorrhaging ivory with Ruaha-Rungwa the apparent epicenter and nobody seems to have raised the alarm,” Broad said, and urged the government to take action to bring the situation under control.

The Tanzanian government says it has added an additional 1,000 rangers to protect wildlife, but Broad said “there is a real risk that it could be a case of too little too late for some elephant populations.”

Read Full Article: AP