The slogan “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets” seemed omnipresent in China in 2015, highlighting a crucial part of Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization. Yet this powerful formulation proved vague in execution, giving local policymakers new headaches on how to strike the balance between development and conservation in making new laws. China’s judiciary faced an even stickier problem. How do you try such cases in the absence of concrete legal text and sufficient legal precedents? 

For decades, western multinational companies have been profiting by exploiting plant, animal, or microbial genetic resources obtained from less developed countries. Take the neem tree, for example. Since the 1990s, international companies have registered more than 70 patents on products derived from India’s “tree of life.” Yet these patents have prohibited local people from using these trees (as they had for centuries) to make cosmetics, fertilizers, and medicines.

International companies have now turned their eyes to the high seas in a new hunt for genetic resources. Concerned they will be left out of the potentially profitable patents once again, developing nations are demanding equitable use and benefit sharing of genetic resources in ongoing global ocean treaty negotiations.

As countries prepare to gather for the Fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in December 2022, the stakes for global biodiversity couldn’t be higher. Over the last half century, global wildlife population sizes plummeted by 60 percent. A 2019 UN report, one among many, warned that the current global response to this accelerating loss of species is insufficient and that “transformative changes are needed to restore and protect nature.”

2022 was a summer of climate extremes across the globe. Multiple heat events simmered across China and Europe, also in regions that are not “supposed to be this hot,” such as the United Kingdom. The western United States also baked in unusual heat, but perhaps the most damaging episode of the season occurred when extreme precipitation caused major flooding in Jackson, Mississippi. This untimely deluge exacerbated a pre-existing water infrastructure crisis in that city, leaving its 150,000, predominately black, residents without access to safe water for days. 

Recycling in the United States is failing. Only 50 percent of packaging is currently recycled. For plastics the rate is lower, only nine percent. The U.S. packaging recycling rate is far below many other countries and has been stagnant for over a decade because our waste management infrastructure is fragmented, inefficient, and underfunded. U.S. city and county governments spend millions of taxpayer dollars each year to manage an expanding and increasingly complex array of packaging waste they had no input in designing or creating. U.S. recyclers are struggling with poorly designed packaging that cannot be recycled and adds cost to the recycling system, and brand owners are unable to source the recycled content they need to honor their public sustainability commitments. Under the current system, consumer packaged goods companies have little incentive to change. 

China dominates the world in its overseas development finance into power plants, mines, dams, and other infrastructure. However, while many projects sail through, a good many get stalled. The results have less to do with Beijing and more with the strength of the host country partners. There is a complex dance between governments, elites, and bureaucrats to win the best “deal” with China, including Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects. These deals may benefit not just the economy, but also may empower one of these three actors. 

Over decades, billions of small lentil-sized plastic pellets, called nurdles, flooded out of the wastewater pipes of Formosa Plastic’s plant in Calhoun Texas into the Gulf of Mexico. For decades, Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman in a rural fishing town called Seadrift, has been tracking and collecting data on the company’s nurdle pollution. In 2019, after three years of constant sampling, she and her scrappy volunteers won a dramatic legal victory with a consent decree mandating 50 million in penalties for past pollution and fines if they do not clean up previous pollution or maintain zero discharge of plastic.

The summer of 2022 has been a season of climatic extremes across the globe, including record-breaking heatwaves and droughts in both the United States and Europe. But even these unprecedented extreme weather events pale in comparison with China’s heatwave from hell. For more than two months, a huge swath of the world’s most populous nation has been baking under temperatures of up to 113 degrees Fahrenheit. According to state media, this extreme heatwave affects an area of over 500,000 square miles, equivalent to more than twice the size of Texas. In terms of duration, intensity, and area affected, it is almost certainly the most severe heatwave ever recorded anywhere in the world.