With air pollution causing more than one million deaths in 2015 and reducing the lifespan of citizens in northern China by three years, clean energy has become a top priority for China’s leaders. China tops the world in wind and solar power installations and the government plans to invest more than $360 billion through 2020 on renewable energy. But the green energy transition needs more than renewable power generation: Long-distance electricity transmission could play a key role in cleaning up China’s brown skies. Our recent study estimated that transmitting a hybrid of renewable and coal power through 12 new high-voltage transmission lines could prevent 16,000 deaths from air pollution exposure, and avoid 340 million tons of CO₂ emissions in China.

In 2011, a group of Hong Kong water activists and researchers traveled the length of the Dongjiang (East) River, which stretches from northeast Guangdong Province into Hong Kong’s New Territories, to investigate the challenges facing the watershed. The Dongjiang basin, which provides nearly 80 percent of Hong Kong’s water supply, has suffered water shortages due to the region’s increasing urbanization and industrialization. They found unchecked wastewater discharges—from agriculture, poultry farms, chemical plants, tanneries, and even an open-air quartz quarry—were dangerously degrading  water quality.

Every day, millions of people flip switches to turn on the lights or warm up the house, while millions of others light candles or wood-fired stoves. While most people know that the source of the energy we use varies according to where we live, many don’t realize that energy decisions are not gender neutral. Every country’s policy decisions about energy production and use have significant implications for women’s empowerment and the level of equality (or inequality) between women and men.

From thick smog blanketing the cities, to acid rain corroding soils and ruining crops, air pollution from China’s coal industry is inflicting heavy damage on the country’s environment, its economy, and its citizens’ health. But these clouds of smoke have obscured the less visible (but no less severe) water challenges facing the coal sector and the region it operates in. 

Chinese cities are being encircled by untreated sludge—a pungent, viscous mixture of human excreta and stormwater runoff. Four years ago in Beijing, trucks loaded with untreated sludge from the city’s largest wastewater treatment plant were illegally dumping mountains of sludge in the outskirts of the capital as “free fertilizer” for peri-urban farms. Similarly, in the southern China city of Guangzhou, disposing toxic sludge into the nearby river required nothing more than a hired boat. From the far western desert city of Urumqi to the eastern metropolis of Shanghai, more and more of China’s cities are struggling to manage mountains of sludge and municipal waste, as well as floods of wastewater and stormwater runoff. 

Launched in Beijing in 2013, the highly successful grassroots “Empty Your Plate” campaign encourages Chinese consumers to eliminate food waste from their meals. Starting with blog posts on Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter), this campaign rapidly swept the entire country and attracted support from the central government, which later issued a series of policies urging restaurants to use smaller dishes and remove minimum charges. However, the volume of food waste in China is still astonishing.

At the G20 Summit in Hamburg early July 2017, leaders of the world’s strongest economies issued a joint statement reaffirming their commitment to the Paris Climate Accord. President Trump—the lone outsider—had announced in early June he would withdraw the United States from the agreement. As China doubles down on meeting its Paris targets, the chasm between the world’s two largest emitters and energy consumers continues to widen as previous joint efforts to curb carbon emissions fade away. Post-summit headlines focusing on the “G19” nations suggest America has abandoned international cooperation against climate change. But some U.S. cities and states are continuing the climate fight with their Chinese counterparts.

Capable of upending rural livelihoods, compromising institutions of governance, and inducing new patterns of migration and crime, global water stress has emerged as one of the principal threats to U.S. national security, said David Reed, senior policy advisor at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and editor of WWF’s new book, Water, Security and U.S. Foreign Policy, on June 27 at the Wilson Center. Four defense and development leaders – retired U.S. Marine Corps General James L. Jones; Paula Dobrianksy, vice chairwoman of the National Executive Committee of the U.S. Water Partnership; retired U.S. Navy Admiral Lee Gunn, vice chairman of the CNA Military Advisory Board; and Kristalina Georgieva, chief executive of the World Bank – joined Reed for a panel discussion of water’s central role in global stability and prosperity.