China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) can significantly affect the country’s domestic and overseas energy transition and decarbonization agenda. Electricity projects in China’s BRI investments, contrary to popular impressions of being part of a monolithic “project of the century,” have divergent implications for the host country’s shift away from coal-based power plants.

Known as “Earth’s kidneys,” wetlands provide a variety of ecological benefits: habitats for diverse species, flood containment, pollutant purification, and carbon absorption. But in China, wetland loss and degradation has exposed people to the whims of climate change. What has China done to protect its wetlands, and how should the country better adapt to climate change with wetlands—a “Great Wall” made of mudflats, mangroves, and waterbirds? Jianbin Shi and Xiaojing Gan, two China-based wetland experts from the Paulson Institute, may enlighten us.

The abundance of milk, cheese, and egg on our kitchen tables are inseparable from the rise of large feed-grain-dependent dairies. In today’s global dairy industry, giant dairy farms are displacing smaller farms and increasing methane emissions. China’s rapid dairy expansion, alongside major players like the EU, US, and New Zealand, also raises environmental concerns. What can government regulators and stakeholders do to curb greenhouse gas emissions from the dairy industry?

Faced with the grim situation of normalized extreme heat and drought, it is imperative for China to improve agricultural resilience to climate change. Rural communities, often led by women, are using seed banks and traditional techniques to boost local crop diversity and food security in order to adapt to climate change.

In December 2022, at the Nansha District port in the Pearl River Delta, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation unveiled China’s first oceanographic drilling ship—capable of mining 10,000 meters deep. This launch showcased China’s rapid advances as a major player in the global race to extract critical minerals at the bottom of the ocean.

The excited bleating of sheep crescendos as farmer Sarah Keiser approaches. “Hi babies,” she says as she steps over a deactivated electric fence and greets the eager flock. It is late July, it hasn’t rained for two months, and the hills around the town of Penngrove, in northern California, have turned a dull brown.   

Picture this: A parade of yaks carrying insulated boxes containing meter-long ice core samples from Tibetan glaciers. “Yaks are like cats,” elite glacier scientist Lonnie Thompson explained in a 2023 Wilson Center webinar. They like to wander off — and it takes experienced Tibetan yak herders to keep them moving in the same direction. 

Yet these yak-schlepped ice cores are essential to climate science, added Ellen Mosely Thompson. They store thousands of years of atmospheric dust and gasses in distinct layers and serve as a record of our changing climate.

As a potent greenhouse gas, methane puts food production in jeopardy though its impacts on planetary warming, reduction of crop yields via tropospheric ozone, and drops in livestock productivity. Cattle, sheep, and goats emit methane as a natural part of their digestive process as ruminants (technically known as “enteric fermentation”) as they turn the fibrous plants of their diet into milk and meat.