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.

China’s war on pollution and goals to lower carbon emissions are noteworthy as the United States takes a back seat in the global energy transition. Cleaner air and low carbon efforts in China could significantly change the country’s environmental health story and contribute to global efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions. However, China’s energy reforms look less green now than they seemed after Paris in 2015. While China’s rate of increase in CO₂ emissions has slowed and the share of renewables in its energy mix continues to grow, the Chinese government’s pursuit of clean air along its east has shifted more polluting and water-intensive coal-fired power development into the country’s west. To continue to lead the way in this “Asian Century,” China must further incorporate water-saving reforms into its energy and environment plans.

“For people who have been refugees for the last 30 years, protecting Afghan wildlife was a way of protecting your own identity,” said Alex Dehgan, CEO and founder of Conservation X Labs, who recently spoke at the Wilson Center at the launch of his book, The Snow Leopard Project: And Other Adventures in Warzone Conservation. He credited his success in Afghanistan to crucial community members. By tapping into their local pride in conservation, Dehgan was able to establish the foundations for the country’s first national park, Band-e-Amir National Park, which opened 2009 in order to protect the endangered snow leopard and the rich biodiversity of Bamyan Province.  

For those working at the intersection of environment, conflict, and peace, 2018 was a notable year. A new conceptual and operational framework for environmental peacebuilding began to emerge. Two particularly substantial developments in 2018 helped to institutionalize environmental peacebuilding: the debut of a massive open online course (MOOC) on environmental security and sustaining peace and the launch of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association.

On 25 January 2019, the UN Security Council held an open debate to discuss the security implications of climate-related disaster events. The meeting, initiated by the Dominican Republic, underscored the global nature of climate-related disasters. Most speakers highlighted the need for better climate risk management as an important contribution to safeguarding international peace and security. The debate marks the beginning of a year in which climate security ranks high on the UN’s agenda.

The Solomon Islands’ “commercially available forests will be gone in about 15 years” due to deforestation, said Lela Stanley, a Policy Advisor for Global Witness’ Asia Forests team at the Wilson Center’s recent China Environment Forum event. It looks like they are logging about 20 times faster than they should for the logging to be sustainable, she added. While timber from the islands is exported to China—the world’s largest importer and consumer of timber products—local residents and communities bear the brunt of the environmental cost of lost ecosystem services suffered at the hands of the timber trade. And they aren’t alone. China’s insatiable demand for raw materials and its harmful resource extraction practices wreak havoc on the ecosystems of its many producer countries.