While the pangolin’s thick overlapping scales protect it from predators such as lions, this animal is an easy mark for illegal wildlife traffickers. Image courtesy of the Tikki Hywood Foundation, Zimbabwe.

Acting on a tip, Nigerian customs operatives raided an apartment in the southwest city of Ikeja in February. Inside, they found some 4,400 pounds of pangolin scales, and 218 ivory tusks—and arrested a Chinese suspect, Ko Sin Ying, who lived there.

A few months earlier, at the other end of a well-worn trade route, Chinese customs officials made the largest-ever seizure of pangolin scales in the port of Shenzhen. They discovered an “empty” shipping container that had come in from Africa—stuffed with 13 tons of scales. They were packaged in bags that camouflaged their true contents beneath a veneer of charcoal. That haul had killed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 animals, each about as big as a medium-sized dog.

In June 2016, the government of the Chinese city of Xiantao cancelled an incineration project following protests by residents who felt they were not adequately consulted before the project was approved. As growing Chinese cities produce more construction and consumer waste, incineration projects have increased—along with widespread protests of their environmental and health consequences.

Put simply, “the damn thing melted,” Navy Secretary Richard Spencer explained in recent testimony, referring to Arctic ice melt as the trigger for the new U.S. Navy Arctic Strategy that is to be released this summer. What the Navy planned as a 16-year road map is in need of updates after only four years, in part due to receding polar ice caps, which are “opening new trade routes, exposing new resources, and redrawing continental maps,” but also in part due to the rise of China as an “Arctic stakeholder” and increasing important player in the region.

Blockchain, the newest technology poised to revolutionize numerous industries, could help decentralize electricity systems across Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States. In Brooklyn, peer-to-peer microgrids allow prosumers—energy consumers who generate small amounts of electricity from renewable sources—to trade energy with other users. Blockchain technology provides distributed ledgers that validate, record, and share each transaction, using smart contracts that automatically execute energy trades when the price and volume of the electricity transaction meet the contracted requirements.

Plastics. From the devastating effects of plastic pollution on our oceans, to the news that plastic bottles likely pollute the drinking water they contain, plastic pollution—the theme of this year’s Earth Day—has been a highly visible issue, and we’ve seen some notable progress on fighting the plastic battle.  

The Lanjiang river in Eastern Zhejiang, China, reached its peak water level of 100 feet the night of June 25, 2017. Lanxi residents remember this day as “6.25,” marking the worst flood since 1955. Elsewhere in China that month, 7.3 million people were affected by floods, landslides, and heavy rains in northwestern Sichuan Province alone. Northern Guangxi suffered direct economic losses of 2.9 billion RMB (US$460 million). In the autonomous regions, 92,000 people were relocated. Flash floods caused the deaths of 10 people and forced 76,800 people to evacuate from Shanxi Province.

In 2014, we met with some of the technical leads of a major Chinese river basin authority in Beijing and asked them whether they were more worried about pollution or climate change impacts. Both, the engineers replied. Pollution affects us every day, they said, but changes in the climate erode our ability to supply drinking and irrigation water, manage floods, and generate electricity.

China must address its environmental and climate change challenges, such as reducing water pollution and building resilience to droughts, floods, and long-term climate shifts. But existing sources of finance have not met the growing demand for environmental projects.

To further its goals to strengthen the global economy, China has already invested $300 billion of its pledged $1 trillion towards its Belt and Road Initiative—a massive infrastructure investment plan that spans 60 countries across Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. China’s initiative will shift the world’s political, environmental, and economic landscape.