In 2018, floods resulted in over 20 casualties and billions of yuan in damage in China, with the government issuing 835 flood warnings nationwide. As global temperatures rise, the combination of extreme weather events and sea level rise threaten the basic infrastructure and water security of low-elevation Chinese cities. Coastal residents account for 43% of China’s population – approximately 170 million citizens live less than ten meters above sea level. In fact, seven of China’s ten largest cities are on the coast, creating high stakes for the government to address impending threats of flooding and sea level rise. Shanghai, China’s largest city, is on the frontlines of climate change as one of the world’s most flood-vulnerable major cities. Shanghai’s government was eager to invest in the sponge city initiative and expand greenspace, rooftop gardens and porous pavements to control stormwater floods. However, officials have been hesitant to invest in climate adaptation measures that don’t create a big splash, like the unglamorous networks of sewage and wastewater infrastructure.

One year after the Sichuan earthquake, while visiting villages near Wenchuan, I asked local officials planning reconstruction about their plans for wastewater treatment. As an agricultural engineering professor, I was not surprised to learn that they had no plans. It was not that a wastewater treatment system was too expensive, they worried that it would be too big.

China’s food security is rooted in its soil.  Sadly, more than 40 percent of China’s soil is degraded from overuse, erosion, and pollution. The government’s 2014 soil survey revealed that 19 percent of China’s farmland was contaminated by metals such as lead, cadmium, and arsenic as well as organic and inorganic chemical pollutants. As part of its growing war on pollution, China’s central government enacted a new soil pollution law on January 1, 2019, to clean up contaminated sites. However, this new law targets just one of the many critical soil quality issues that reduce agricultural yield but does not address the problem of compacted soil.

In a giant building filled with dark and humid rooms, some 2 billion cockroaches are scampering around piles of food. This is not a scene out of a horror film, but an innovative business venture to help Jinan, a “small” city of 9 million in northeast China, deal with its overfull food waste. Jinan produces more than 6,000 tons of solid waste each day, and like most Chinese cities, 50 to 70 percent of it is food waste. To divert more organic waste from landfills, the municipal government partnered with the Zhangqiu District Food Waste Processing Center to use cockroaches to dispose of the 60 tons of food waste daily from district restaurants and companies as well as households in 40 waste-sorting pilot villages. The company is highly profitable as it gets the food waste for free from the city; and city then gives subsidies for each ton of food waste processed. The company also sells some 2,433 tons of dead cockroaches each year as animal feed additives. However, the small six-legged workers only devour some 100 tons of food waste per day even with expansion plans for two new factories, a mere 1.6 percent of the city’s total  waste. Cockroaches alone cannot conquer the city’s food waste challenge.

As an agricultural engineering professor, I was excited to visit and tour the farm village Houbali, in southwestern Shandong Province. I found myself standing among newly constructed high-rise buildings, a vastly different community than I had expected to encounter. A bicycle repair shop was setting up alongside other bustling businesses in the first-floor storefronts. Farm families occupied apartments in the upper floors and a beautifully landscaped park and playground were a short walk away. This neighborhood looked like a transplant from Beijing, but these modern buildings were a newly developed farm village surrounded by agricultural fields. The new buildings brought together the residents of four old, nearly empty or “hollow” villages.

In September 2018, the Jinghu District People’s Court in Wuhu, Anhui Province sentenced 12 people from the Pol Shin Fastener Company between four months and six years in prison for committing serious interprovincial environmental crimes in Jiangsu and Anhui in 2016 and 2017. The court also fined the automobile hardware manufacturer 10 million yuan ($1.48 million). The crime? Dispatching ships and trucks to illegally dump 2500+ metric tons of highly acidic pickling sludge from steel production. Sludge—semi-solid waste emissions from industries and municipal water treatment plants—is yet another tough water and solid waste pollution challenge China faces.

Blanketed by freshly fallen snow, mountains of the Teton Range loomed above as I explored the picturesque town of Jackson, Wyoming. A native Bostonian, I had no experience in the heart of the country, but that week I wasn’t the only outsider wandering Jackson’s icy streets. In November 2018, experts from all over the world gathered in Jackson to attend the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs Forum with one common goal: to identify the challenges and opportunities for coal communities worldwide as they transition their economies away from coal.  

For solar industry professionals in China, May 31, 2018, is a day that will live in infamy. At the beginning of 2018, Chinese domestic solar developers were riding a high after reaching a record 53 GW of newly installed solar capacity the previous year. Most sources projected this breakneck pace of new solar construction would continue through 2018. On June 1, 2018, however, the National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Finance, and National Energy Agency announced a new policy to lower the solar feed-in-tariff, halt subsidized utility-scale development, and implement a quota for distributed projects. Industry professionals refer to the infamous policy as “531” for May 31, 2018, the day that the solar industry ground to a temporary halt or “freezing point.”