China’s energy investments are on the move, touching nearly every region of the globe from coal and liquefied natural gas imports from Australia to a recent natural gas agreement with Russia and expanded oil drilling in the South China Sea. [Video Below]

Motivated in part by mounting public pressure to cut down on the smog created by more than 600 coal-fired power plants, China’s nuclear energy capacity is growing faster than any other country in the world.

China faces a dilemma. It is home to 20 percent of the world’s population but only seven percent of the world’s water resources and nine percent of the world’s arable land. At the same time, a rising middle class is demanding more food. Over the last 30 years, China’s meat demand has quadrupled.

China leads the world in installed wind power by a wide margin, but last year, when it came to actual generation, China produced 20 percent less electricity from wind than the United States.

Last September, facing a growing public outcry to ease smog, China’s State Council called for the accelerated development of a new energy industry that turns coal into methane gas. Piped to Beijing and other cities, this gas could help cut down on smog by replacing dirtier fuels now used to cook meals, heat homes, and produce electricity. But embracing it involves a major environmental trade-off in overall carbon emissions.

Half the world’s pigs – 476 million – reside in China. Increasingly prosperous consumers are eating fewer grains and demanding a more protein-rich diet, ballooning the pork industry to 15 times its 1960s-era size. In the last 30 years, Chinese demand for meat has quadrupled and China is now the largest consumer of seafood in the world.

In southwestern China, three parallel rivers – the Nu, Lancang, and Jinsha (also known as the Upper Mekong, Salween, and Yangtze, respectively) – form a series of corridors that connect the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia to the Tibetan Plateau. These areas are some of the most biodiverse in the world, and scientists argue they have value as “climate refugia” – places worth preserving in order to allow species to retreat to cooler, more suitable climates as temperatures rise. A cascade of dams, however, has been planned for the region, threatening to submerge habitats, reduce the flow of tributary rivers, and make the area less suitable for many plant and animal species.

The idea that China, the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions, could generate a significant portion of its energy from renewable sources might seem like a distant dream, but according to a new report, it’s not so far off. [Video Below]