Coal has long been China’s “black gold,” supplying over half of the nation’s electricity. Yet as coal’s energy share decreases due to domestic action to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, a new coal industry is emerging. In China’s arid northwest, eight plants are pulverizing coal chunks and “cooking” coal powder into something more valuable than power—or maybe even gold. These coal conversion plants, soon numbering over 20, churn out chemicals to produce plastic.

Usually after dinner, Mr. Ma would take off his shirt, shut the door, and begin work making plastic pellets from scrap. But tonight, he sits in his darkened yard staring at two SUV-sized plastic processing machines and a bundle of colorful scrap plastic. No lights are on, no machines grind, and no familiar theme song of CCTV-1 plays in the background. Walking through other villages in Wen’an County, more men meander around their yards filled with the same idle processing machines and mini-mountains of scrap plastic. Most have never studied English, but they are fluent in the language of plastics, sprinkling words like ABS, PP, and PVC into their conversations. They are the owners of small plastic scrap recycling workshops that were once booming—but are now silent.

“If you go to some Taiwan beaches, you can see snow,” said Chieh-Shen (Jason) Hu, Ocean Initiative Coordinator for Taiwan’s Society of Wilderness, a 6,000-member organization similar to Sierra Club. Hu was referring to pervasive Styrofoam marine debris from western Taiwan’s oldest industry, oyster aquaculture.

In Wuxi, a city 84 miles west of Shanghai, nearly 2 million residents had foul smelling green water coming out of their taps for a week in May 2007. Wuxi sits on the shores of Lake Tai, China’s third largest freshwater lake. And on that week in May, it experienced a perfect cocktail of industrial effluents, agricultural runoff, and sewage, which created a toxic cyanobacterial bloom, leaving 70 percent of the city’s water undrinkable. The Lake Tai incident was not an anomaly. Poor oversight and enforcement of water pollution regulations and standards has long left between 30 and 50 percent of China’s surface and groundwater undrinkable.

This summer, Iraqi citizens in Basra demonstrated in the streets to protest a serious public health crisis caused by polluted water. The condition of their water infrastructure was deplorable after years of devastating wars, corruption, and droughts and regional hydropolitics. More than 100,000 people have reportedly been poisoned by polluted water, while recent estimates warn that some 277,000 children are at risk of diseases, such as cholera due to rundown water and sanitation facilities at schools.

China is four years into its war on pollution, and while the skies over many of its cities are bluer and thousands of polluting industries have been closed, many challenges remain. According to China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, 16 percent of China’s soil is polluted, 239 of China’s 338 biggest cities failed to meet air quality standards in 2017, and 32 percent of China’s surface water is not clean enough to swim in. To confront these challenges, Chinese citizens and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are taking legal action to halt polluters, push local government to be more accountable, and strengthen enforcement of pollution laws—but most lack the legal experience and expertise needed to be successful. A series of workshops held by the Environmental Law Institute earlier this year sought to close this gap by training NGOs and legal professionals in China on best practices for environmental public interest litigation.

“Functioning natural systems are critical to human survival itself,” said Carrie Thompson, Deputy Assistant Administrator of the Bureau for Economic Growth, Education and Environment at USAID, at a recent Wilson Center event on USAID’s efforts to increase the effectiveness of its biodiversity conservation programs. Measuring Impact was designed to help support USAID’s 2014 Biodiversity Policy, which is “grounded in a recognition that human well-being and progress are dependent on the health of biodiverse systems and [that] durable development gains are not possible unless these systems are valued and safeguarded,” said Cynthia Gill, Director of USAID’s Office of Forestry and Biodiversity.

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.