Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are revving up in China. As part of the 2018 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, more than one hundred AVs swerved perfect 8’s on the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, showcasing Baidu Apollo’s latest AV technology. China is a latecomer to the automotive industry, but it is taking the wheel in autonomous driving technologies and electric and hydrogen cars, viewing the sector as an unprecedented opportunity to play catchup with the rest of the world (See China Environment Forum webinar on China’s new energy vehicle trends below). Companies in China and around the world want to tap into the lucrative autonomous technology market that could reach $2.3 trillion by 2030.

In Wuxi, a city 84 miles west of Shanghai, nearly 2 million residents had foul smelling green water coming out of their taps for a week in May 2007. Wuxi sits on the shores of Lake Tai, China’s third largest freshwater lake. And on that week in May, it experienced a perfect cocktail of industrial effluents, agricultural runoff, and sewage, which created a toxic cyanobacterial bloom, leaving 70 percent of the city’s water undrinkable. The Lake Tai incident was not an anomaly. Poor oversight and enforcement of water pollution regulations and standards has long left between 30 and 50 percent of China’s surface and groundwater undrinkable.

China’s war on pollution and goals to lower carbon emissions are noteworthy as the United States takes a back seat in the global energy transition. Cleaner air and low carbon efforts in China could significantly change the country’s environmental health story and contribute to global efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions. However, China’s energy reforms look less green now than they seemed after Paris in 2015. While China’s rate of increase in CO₂ emissions has slowed and the share of renewables in its energy mix continues to grow, the Chinese government’s pursuit of clean air along its east has shifted more polluting and water-intensive coal-fired power development into the country’s west. To continue to lead the way in this “Asian Century,” China must further incorporate water-saving reforms into its energy and environment plans.

The Solomon Islands’ “commercially available forests will be gone in about 15 years” due to deforestation, said Lela Stanley, a Policy Advisor for Global Witness’ Asia Forests team at the Wilson Center’s recent China Environment Forum event. It looks like they are logging about 20 times faster than they should for the logging to be sustainable, she added. While timber from the islands is exported to China—the world’s largest importer and consumer of timber products—local residents and communities bear the brunt of the environmental cost of lost ecosystem services suffered at the hands of the timber trade. And they aren’t alone. China’s insatiable demand for raw materials and its harmful resource extraction practices wreak havoc on the ecosystems of its many producer countries.

BENGALURU, India – In a small town in the suburbs of this booming city, K.V. Muniraju knows all too well the decade-old battle of securing water for his crops. With groundwater tables continuously falling, the middle-aged farmer once borrowed heavily to dig wells ever deeper.

From the cultural hub of Lahore down to the bustling ports of Karachi, smog is king in Pakistan, with citizens enduring unhealthy air quality for much of the year. The smog, generated mostly by crop and garbage burning and diesel emissions from furnaces and cars, could get worse by the end of this year when Pakistan opens five new Chinese-built coal power plants, funded by a $6.8 billion venture under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) initiative. These five plants are just the beginning of the Pakistan government’s planned 7,560 MW expansion in coal power, which are CPEC-energy priority projects. “It’s a perfect storm for a pollution crisis,” said Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center’s Asia Program. “The poor will continue to burn a variety of polluting materials to produce fuel, and now you’re also going to be introducing dirty coal into the mix. Combine that with crop burning in the countrywide and car exhaust fumes in rapidly growing cities, and you’ve got a really smoggy mess on your hands—and in your lungs.”

Huo Chang grows visibly exasperated as he speaks about his city’s water crisis. From his office in Beijing’s largest state-owned environmental investment and service company, China Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Group (CECEP), the water expert explains how Beijing is in the throes of a population and economic boom that has left its water resources both polluted and depleted. In response to these opposing pressures, the city turned to controversial measures to avoid a Cape Town-like Day Zero crisis in which Beijing would no longer be able to meet the daily water needs of its population of nearly 22 million.

China—the world’s fastest-growing economy with the largest population—leads the world in cement production, the critical ingredient that has built China’s mammoth cities, sprawling roads, and other infrastructure. China pours 60 percent of the world’s cement; the country’s production in 2011-2013 surpassed U.S. production for the entire 20th century. While it paved the way for Chinese growth, it came at a dangerous cost: 1.6 million Chinese citizens die each year from respiratory illnesses linked to small particulate matter emissions, of which 27 percent come from cement production.