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.

A high degree of political will is one of several pre-conditions needed for good environmental management, said Kim DeRidder, Regional Director for Environmental Programs at the Asia Foundation. He spoke at a round-table on Advancing Environmental Governance Across Asia hosted by the Asia Foundation. While he emphasized the need to promote political will within Asia, he questioned whether the bold pledges that some Asian countries made in the Paris Agreement, such as the Philippines’ pledge to reduce emissions by 70 percent by 2030 and Indonesia by 26 percent, were realistic given the significant disconnect between what a country claims it is going to do and what it can actually do.

In many Middle Eastern wars, targeting civilian infrastructure has become all too common. As we documented in a previous article,  both state and non-state actors in wars since 2011 in Libya, Syria, and Yemen have targeted water, sanitation, and energy facilities to displace urban populations, punish civilians, and render local attempts to provide public services untenable.  Destroying environmental and civilian infrastructure directly undermines livelihoods and human security. 

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.”

While the U.S. has been fixated on President Trump’s contentious border wall project, another more ominous threat facing Guatemalans is building internally. In a swift reversal, many politicians and scholars who have previously argued for directing increased U.S. aid to communities in Central America’s Northern Triangle—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—as a humanitarian alternative to the border wall, are now calling on Congress to suspend some forms of aid to Guatemala, which they now see as the more humane option.