The greening of China began with the founding of the People`s Republic, and it has not stopped since. The massive tree-planting programmes of the past century mean that China now has a greater area of man-made forests than any other country. In 2003 artificial forests covered over 1% of China`s total land mass for the first time. By 2006 artificial forest coverage had reached 520,000 square kilometres.
On July 18, the herders of Cuochi village in northwest China`s Qinghai province launched the “Ecological Culture Festival”. At the same time, Wang Dajun, a professor at the Peking University School of Bioscience, made a speech in Bejiing to the Green Journalists Salon (founded by Wang Yongchen and Zhang Kejia) where he described the charms of Cuochi, its joy and its fears.
Cuochi lies at the centre of a wild animal reserve in the Three River Source Nature Reserve, which covers an area of 2,124.5 square kilometers on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, at an average elevation of 4,200 metres above sea level. Its highest point is 4,800 metres, and Cuochi is one of the highest herding villages in China.
The first-time visitor to Cuochi will be struck by its peaceful air and the sense that the village is removed from the stresses of everyday life. The scenery is picturesque, its people are kind and welcoming. However, visit more often and it becomes apparent what huge changes are taking place. Roads have been built, cutting the journey from Golmud to Cuochi from three or four days to a half-day. The villagers now ride motorbikes instead of horses. Some own digital cameras and similar electrical devices, which they recharge at a new, solar-powered electricity point.
Quick, convenient travel and the exchange of products and information have given the villagers modern comforts. But there have also been negative consequences. Cuochi – like many places in China – once prided itself on the harmony it achieved between people, and between people and the environment; a harmony that has gradually been disappearing. One example is to be seen in the deterioration of Cuochi`s grasslands. However, the village has started to come up with its own ways of reversing this trend.
Haxi Zhaxiduojie, known to locals as “Zhaduo”, is deputy secretary of the local environmental protection committee. He won an award this year from China Central Television for his work improving environmental protection and helping community cohesion. His work is popularly called “community management”, and Cuochi Village has been its main testing-ground.
Under the community management scheme, villagers were mobilised to study the environment – its recurring natural phenomena, flora, fauna and geography – at the same time as they tend to their cows and goats. Zhaduo believes that environmental protection is ultimately a question of community cohesion, of turning selfishness into public-mindedness. Some people think this can only follow once people have become rich. There are many places in China where the attitude to environmental protection is “pollute first, clean up later”. But as the saying goes, we should not wait until the patient is near death before administering the cure; better to help the patient stay fit in the first place. “People are always saying that we need money before we can start conserving the environment,” says Zhaduo. “But money does not bring wisdom, or a sense of the public good; sometimes it can even erode these.”
L%26uuml; Zhi, the head of the China office for Conservation International and a professor of conservation biology at Peking University, leads a team that has strengthened Cuochi`s research capabilities. Lu and Wang Dajun help villagers to design experiments, devise methodologies and analyse their results. Says Wang: “The herders are highly sensitive to their environment; they have accumulated far more knowledge than us about the environment over the years. Our research is aimed at mobilising and building on this knowledge.”
“In Qinghai today,” says Wang, “pikas are being killed in huge numbers. Cuochi is the only area that does not kill pikas, because they discovered that grassland deterioration is not caused by the pika; the animals only appear where the grassland is already degraded. It`s the same with marmots. Marmots are valuable these days; people come from outside to hunt and kill them indiscriminately. But like pikas, they are an important part of the ecosystem on the plateau. If numbers decline, how will the wolves, brown bears and birds of prey survive? If they are all killed, will the grassland ever be able to recover? In many areas, parts of the grassland are now being sectioned off for protection, and this is very popular with the herders. However, we are trying to remind them that carving up the grasslands, which are supposed to be interconnected, is not going to be a sustainable option.”
This research is also work for the public good, and this is why it can become a new force for community cohesion. Zhaduo, L%26uuml; and their colleagues are looking for ways to get villagers interested in research and public works. They hope that a greater appreciation of the relationships between people and nature will help them withstand the negative effects that an invasion of commercial products brings. “People aren`t afraid of transport links and material goods,” says L%26uuml;. “What they`re afraid of are the effects these things can have on people and nature. Community management, and the research that goes along with it, can help foster a spirit of public works, and help to slow down or prevent community breakdown.”
With this in mind, the Ecological Culture Festival hopes to help prevent the loss of the area`s unique charms, while creating a sense of community belonging. For almost 10 days, the village became a site of constant activity, from performances of local songs, dances and storytelling, to lessons on recognising flora and fauna, and a photography competition.
Zhaduo says that the festival fits in with elements of Tibetan tradition. It ensures the continuation of local traditions, while adding to environmental ideas. Environmental films, costume performances and horse-racing all add to the experience. Together, the activities hope to foster a positive spirit among the villagers, awakening an enthusiasm to take part in conservation work.
Conservation International sees the festival an important part of training for its workers, encouraging them to put their environmental knowledge into practice, particularly with regard to the environment of the plateau. Its staff can learn a lot about community conservation from the herders. Sun Shan, director of the Conservation International project, says that the festival stirs up feelings of happiness, mixed with concern about the future. “Sometimes it`s hard to tell whether it`s us helping them, or them helping us,” says Sun. “Maybe we`re all just working to save ourselves”.
Yongfeng Feng is a Beijing-based environmental journalist
All pictures courtesy of Conservation International
[This article is an excerpt from "Reign of Sand: Inner Mongolia", published by Circle of Blue. It is republished here with permission.]
An Asian Sahara of sand is moving closer every year to Beijing, blackening the sky, and producing environmental refugees and social unrest in Inner Mongolia and throughout China.
“Desertification is not a natural function,” said John D Liu, an American-born journalist, researcher and director of the Environmental Education Media Project (EEMP) for China, a 10-year-old environmental organisation based in Beijing. “Scientifically what’s happening is that the grasslands are losing natural infiltration and retention of water, which is altering respiration and evaporation rates. That affects relative humidity, and potentially precipitation in other regions.”
“Socially and politically, what you are talking about are policy decisions made in earlier eras %26mdash; from the 1950s to the 1990s %26mdash; and now those mistakes are really biting them,” added Liu, who’s lived and worked in China since 1979. “They have to deal with the decisions made in those years. And in Inner Mongolia those decisions have produced some horrific consequences. Large areas of the region have been massively devegetated.”
As Beijing prepares for the 29th Olympic Games in August 2008, the dust storms and deteriorating condition of Inner Mongolia’s grasslands have also become a priority of Chinese environmental scientists and agronomists.
During the first of week of July, China will host the International Grassland and Rangeland Congress in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, a high-plains city of 2.3 million people. Hong Fuzeng, head of the preparatory committee of the 2008 Congress and a grasslands scientist, said the conference will focus the attention of 3,000 rangeland experts from around the world on the environmental, demographic and industrial trends that are turning Inner Mongolia’s grasslands to desert.
The blowing sand, in short, is more evidence of the consequences of the irrational duel China fights daily as it promotes rapid industrial development while exposing land, water, communities and people to levels of pollution, waste and resource diminishment never before seen on the planet.
China is the most polluted country on earth. Its air and water consistently rank among the dirtiest anywhere. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that pollution causes an estimated 750,000 premature deaths annually in China, the majority among the elderly and children.
There are economic costs as well. Earlier this year, the World Bank conservatively estimated that the cost of China’s environmental degradation is 3.5% to 8% of the gross domestic product annually. The cost of desertification caused by water scarcity alone, said the bank, is roughly US$31 billion a year. While many finance theorists predict that China may become the pre-eminent industrialised nation this century, environmental economists say China is outrunning the capacity of its natural resources to sustain such rapid development, and could instead experience a frightening ecological collapse.
Blowing sand has attracted environment advocates of all stripes in China. One of them is Chen Jiqun, an artist who specialises in landscapes and portraits. Chen was 20 years old in 1967 when he went to East Ujumchin Banner, a section of eastern Inner Mongolia 600 hundred miles north of China’s capital.
Inner Mongolia during that period was a place of astonishing beauty and harshness. Though the air rarely was still and the ground was dry, great expanses of tall grass swept to the horizons, unfurling like a great waving sea beneath surpassingly huge skies. Summers were short and hot. Winters were ferocious, marked by blizzards and knife-edge cold. Thousands of Inner Mongolians, a people distinguished by sturdiness and stamina, followed the nomadic ways, freely herding livestock from one range to the next.
Chen Jiqun stayed for 13 years, working different jobs on the land as he painted. The grasslands of Chen Jiqun’s student years live in his paintings: vast landscapes filled with horses galloping between herds of sheep, goats and cows grazing on foot-high grass on the banks of rippled rivers.
Those paintings, drawn from personal history and memory, could now just as easily fall into the category of artistic fantasy. The grasslands of Inner Mongolia and other northern Chinese provinces are dying, turning into mini-deserts that grow and connect, forming oceans of sand. In some regions of the province, 70% of the grasslands have turned to desert. Inner Mongolia, according to conservative estimates, is losing 1,500 to 2,000 square miles (roughly 3,900 to 5,200 square kilometers) annually to the desert.
The speed of the conversion of grass to dust is astonishingly fast. Inner Mongolia, China’s third-largest province, stretches 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometres) east to west and more than 600 miles (965 kilometres) north to south in some places. As recently as the 1960s, according to estimates by the Chinese environmental agency, almost three-quarters of Inner Mongolia was grass. The province’s thin soil, 15 inches (381 millimetres) of rainfall annually, and nomadic herders supported one of the planet’s most robust wild ranges, a grass ecosystem nearly twice as large as France.
No longer. According to estimates by the United Nations, since 1980 desert has claimed two million acres (810,000 hectares) of cropland, nearly six million acres (2.43 million hectares) of rangeland, and 16 million acres (6.5 million hectares) of forests in northern China. Almost a quarter of China already is desert. The steady desertification of northern China has put the world’s fastest growing economy, a nation of 1.3 billion people, at the frontline of the global freshwater crisis.
Indeed, the images of Inner Mongolia that Chen painted, galloping horses and moving herds, are largely gone, the result of ineffective and disputed policies to try to contain the spreading desert. In essence, the Chinese government forced the nomadic herders and their grass-consuming animals to stop wandering.
Still, the desert and the sand storms are growing. Chen’s goal is to help the nomadic herders he knows find solutions to the spreading sand. He believes herders have some answers, drawing on centuries of accumulated knowledge of the land and local conditions, and not on technical theories, many of them failed, mandated over the last four decades by Beijing.
There is little disagreement in China that changes in patterns of precipitation in an already parched region, leading to severe shortages of freshwater, plays an integral role in the spread of desertification. But agreeing on the underlying socioeconomic drivers and solving the problems have fostered divisions in the Chinese scientific community, and between the government and its people. The efforts to stabilise sand dunes, which have varied in their success, include aerial seeding, and planting a 74-million-acre (30-million-hectare) “Great Green Wall” of trees, 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometres) long, stretching from the northeast through Inner Mongolia to Xinjiang in the far west.
Chinese officials also have responded with various, sometimes conflicting, policies. In 1994, China joined the newly formed UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Two years later, it began to publish a series of management plans that, among other things, called for China to plant 95 million acres [39 million hectares] of grass, shrubs and trees to reduce desert conditions on 190 million acres [77 million hectares] of land by 2050.
Few are confident it will stabilise the land, and Chen is especially sceptical. “The scientists fence off the grasslands to run their experiments, but that’s not natural, and so it doesn’t work in the real world.”
Though conceding that Chinese scientists have made some progress, he bitterly recalled past policies. “They planted poplar trees everywhere! The grasslands didn’t have any trees, so how could they think that poplar trees were appropriate? Furthermore, practices that worked in one area were often taken as model practices to be implemented everywhere, regardless of whether the amount of rainfall or soil or climate were different!”
Other policies, some of them sources of intense disagreement, are meant to influence human behavior. None is more contentious than the “ecological migration” program, initiated in Inner Mongolia in 2001, which requires removing 640,000 Mongol, Kazakh and Tibetan herders from the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet into towns and cities.
The forced movements, said the government, were intended to reduce pressure on the grasslands from overgrazing. But Mongols viewed the policy as discriminatory, a programme designed to make water, minerals and land more accessible to Han Chinese businesses and immigrants.
The relocation program has prompted frequent and sometimes violent protests. Still, almost every current assessment, even those by the Chinese government, indicates the technical and policy programs have not stopped the deserts. Each time Chen Jiqun returns to Inner Mongolia, he sees more ground where grass once grew. The stretches of sand expand, the water holes and rivers run dry.
In 1998, Chen felt he needed to respond. “I kept reading about what was happening on the grasslands, but it was never from the viewpoint of the Mongol herders. Actually, they were always cast as the cause of desertification rather than as the victims,” he said.
Chen turned to his artistic spirit, finding a reservoir not only of empathy, intelligence, and anger, but also expert visual and communications skills. He had, in other words, the makings of an activist. Chen already was fluent in Chinese and Mongolian. He wrote well and painted superbly. His first step in responding to Inner Mongolia’s human suffering and environmental deterioration was to start a bilingual Mongolian and Chinese website, Echoing Steppe, to help represent the views of the Mongol herders.
Echoing Steppe began as a free-form site, posting paintings and short text reports filled with anecdotes from herders, many by Chen, about what was happening. The site attracted the attention of Friends of Nature, an education and advocacy organisation formed in Beijing in 1994, and China’s first legal nongovernmental organisation (NGO) specialising in environmental issues.
Liang Congjie, a professor at the Academy of Chinese Culture and the co-founder and president of Friends of Nature, took a personal interest in Chen’s work, describing in words and pictures Inner Mongolia’s deteriorating condition. Chen’s reportage and images were fast turning him into one of the foremost experts on Inner Mongolia desertification.
By 2002 Chen found himself leading tours of Chinese students, activists, and interested citizens to the grasslands. He also studied laws that focussed on property rights, grasslands and desertification. Using the proceeds from the tours as well as his own money, Chen began translating and publishing those laws on Echoing Steppes.
“How can China become a nation of laws when its people can not even read the laws?” Chen said. He eventually added English translations to his website in order to raise international awareness about the situation in Inner Mongolia. He distributed copies of the laws to herders during his frequent trips to Inner Mongolia.
“Desertification is complex, and we have to hear all sides,” said Chen. “But people have not heard the side of the Mongol herders. I want people to understand the history of the Mongolian grasslands from the herders’ viewpoint, because if we don’t understand the history of the grasslands, the grasslands don’t have a future.”
W. Chad Futrell is a PhD candidate in development sociology at Cornell University in the United States. He recently completed two years of fieldwork on transnational environmental cooperation to prevent desertification and protect wetlands in Northeast Asia.
The grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau are steadily degrading, a phenomenon that the Chinese government blames on the cattle and sheep kept by local herders. From 2003, many of the herders in the area known as the Three Rivers Source, from which the Yangtze River, Yellow River and Mekong (Lancang) River originate, have been moved to the outskirts of urban areas in order to give the grasslands some respite. I found, however, that a failure to effectively replace herders` livelihoods has led to a drop in their living standards.
The 631 million yuan (US$92 million) resettlement project aims to resettle 89,358 people in more than 10 counties, cities and autonomous prefectures of Qinghai province. To date, almost 60,000 people in 10,000 households have been moved from their homes to the outskirts of county seats, where the authorities provide housing and living subsidies.
The county of Zhiduo is known as the “first county on the Yangtze” and is home to the famous Hoh Xil, or Kekexili Nature Reserve. The village of Suojia, in Zhiduo, covers 8,000 square kilometres. It is an important habitat for wildlife including the Tibetan antelope and it is the source of the Tongtian River, a tributary of the Yangtze River. Since 2005, as part of the ecological resettlement program, herders have been moved from Suojia to the outskirts of the county town, forming a “migrant village” of almost 200 households.
The county town itself is not large, but there is a short distance between the migrants and the town proper, leading to a psychological gap between the two populations.
“Zhaduo” (a contraction of the Tibetan name Tashi Dorje), the deputy secretary-general of the Qinghai Three Rivers Ecological Protection Association, was once an assistant to Sonam Dargyi, a hero in the fight to save the Tibetan antelope who in 2006 received a posthumous CCTV award for his work, after he was murdered by poachers in 1994.
Zhaduo knows the new arrivals well. If they are not relatives, they are his friends. I accompanied him on visits to many of the migrants` homes. The government has provided each family with an identical house with a newly dug well in the yard and a stove in the centre of the house. This is the sum total of household goods the government has provided. Each household receives an annual subsidy of 6,000 yuan ($877) and an extra 1,000 yuan ($146) for fuel. These subsidies will be provided for 10 years, after which the migrants are free to return to their homes, if they wish.
The Kunlun Ethnic Culture Village, on the southern outskirts of Ge`ermu, is mainly occupied by ecological migrants from Qumalai county, where the Yellow River has its source. In Kunlun, 240 households have been settled; like those in Zhiduo, the migrants live outside the town proper. Their children can attend school in the town and they can use the local hospitals, but they are still regarded as “incomers” and are officially under the administration of their original county government.
Tsering Lobsang used to be a village head in Qumalai county. In 2005, like many other villagers, he was happy to hear about the relocation. Life in the city was bound to be better, he thought. But things were not as easy as he had hoped. “Here you`ve got to buy everything, but on the pastures we already had everything we needed: we got it all from the animals. We burned dung for fuel there, but here we`ve got to pay for coal or gas. There we got water from the river, here it is piped and it`s only on for an hour a day. At home we can go to the toilet anywhere, there`s no danger of pollution. Here we`ve got a flushing toilet, but that`s no use without water.”
Tsering Lobsang is worried about the future: “After we arrived here, we sold off our livestock. Our houses were knocked down and the pastures were handed over to the state. But now we are here we can`t find work. Lots of people are just sitting at home all day.”
The new arrivals stand out in Ge`ermu, which did not have many Tibetan residents previously. According to the plan, the village was to build a range of public facilities, but the majority of them have not appeared. A rubbish collection point was built in 2006, but its contents were never taken away. It quickly filled up and started to stink. In the end, the village had no option but to dig a hole on some empty ground and use it as a dump.
The authorities of Qumalai, Zhiduo and Ge`ermu always hoped to provide jobs. The government has on occasion dispatched study groups to find solutions, but a lack of resources and technology has prevented any breakthrough. The migrants often feel they have been discarded.
A cadre from Qumalai said that the herders living on the outskirts of cities are themselves a “tourism resource”: attractions based around their horses, ethnic dances and traditional tents could be developed. This was the idea behind Kunlun Ethnic Culture Village, where some of the migrants put up tents, with the young folk employed in service and entertainment jobs. But visitor numbers have been low.
In the migrant villages there is a small shop every few paces. This does not need any technology to set up, but business is slow and they are unlikely to survive. Some of the villagers have given up and gone home to work as herders for people who were allowed to stay on the pastures, which brings in a small income.
The residents of Kunlun started a stone-carving workshop in order to sell carvings to tourists. But visitor numbers were low and those who did come were not keen on carrying a heavy piece of stone home, so few were sold. Now a clothing factory is planned, but without funds it is unlikely to get off the ground.
Zhaduo is even more worried than the others: he doesn`t know if the villagers will be able to integrate into town life, or if they will be able to get used to their original lifestyles if they move back in 10 years time.
He says that traditional Tibetan lifestyles are very environmentally friendly, especially because of Tibetan religious traditions. Tibetan Buddhism advocates respect for life and nature, and teachings about sacred mountains and holy lakes match well with current environmental concepts. It is very easy to use these traditions and religious teachings to urge local herders to fight against environmentally damaging behaviour. A partnership between the Qinghai Three Rivers Ecological Protection Association and Conservation International proved the efficacy of this method.
“If the locals can realise environmental protection and sustainable development without relocating, would there be any need to move them?” asks Zhaduo. Perhaps this could be a new solution.
Backgrounder: the Three Rivers Source
The “Three Rivers Source” refers to the sources of the Yangtze River, Yellow River and Mekong, or Lancang River, located on the Tibetan Plateau in western China, in southern Qinghai province. The area covers 302,500 square kilometres and has a current population of 556,000, 90% of whom are Tibetan. There are also Han, Hui, Salar and Mongol residents.
Historically this was an area of alpine meadows dotted with lakes, home to wild plants and animals. In recent decades glaciers and snow on the mountains have receded. Lakes and wetlands are shrinking; the land is drying up and becoming desert. Soil and water is being lost from a wider area. Desertification and degradation of grasslands is worsening. Forests have been damaged and 20% of local species are endangered. In some areas it is hard for locals to survive and they have no choice but to move.
Feng Yongfeng is a science reporter for Guangming Daily
If I had a dime for every time some one has told me in recent weeks that the Chinese characters for crisis mean both danger and opportunity, I could probably bail out Wall Street myself.
Weiji is the word in question, and while wei does mean danger, ji means “crucial point”. Such are the times we live in, a crucial and potentially dangerous point for the future of people and planet.
The question that faces us is whether the aim of achieving a sustainable future is about to be swept aside by the toxic combination of Wall Street greed, hubris and avarice, played out at a time of hardball calculation during a US presidential election campaign. Years of cheap credit, combined with a lack not only of regulation but also of any real interest in the instruments and institutions of wealth creation, which have come together in an uncontainable conflagration of loans disguised as derivatives, built on trailer parks confused with mansions. The global house of cards now risks falling apart.
In these circumstances, it is not so much truth that is the first casualty of war, but trust. “Trust no-one” is the credo of today, and in our 2.0, interconnected global village, a financial butterfly that flaps it wings over the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean can cause a credit whirlwind in Somalia and Burundi. (I mention these as the three countries most vulnerable to climate change in a recent study).
I believe the way ahead is going to hinge on the clash of two forces: in one corner, two unlikely allies, the realpolitik of American power and economic might, shadow-boxing with a rising China; in the other, the opportunity and imperative of creating a secure, commercially successful and sustainable world, in which 9 billion people can live on some basis of shared equity.
What matters is not so much money as value: how we monetise the things we produce, consume and trade, across time and space. We talk a lot about non-financial indicators in the sustainability space, but we live in a material world, and if you cannot touch the cash and trust in the promise to pay, then the foundations of economic life crumble.
So where is the money now? According to a recent IMF analysis of the current crisis, the answer to this complex question is disarmingly simple: it is in the sovereign wealth funds and other financial institutions that through oil, trade and savings have been accumulating cash in such countries as China and the United Arab Emirates. But it is frozen, beyond the reach of the ordinary mortals of the world. We are living in a new global financial ice age, and we need a big thaw, so that wealth can be released to create sustainable value.
What is the new deal going to look like, which might thaw this frozen wealth?
Wealth comes with, and is vested in, power. And people, institutions and countries are of course going to want something back, financially and politically, for sharing it. While they will not act out of spontaneous generosity, there are grounds for hoping that the result will be for the good of the planet: those with money can profit, reliably and for the long-term, and – like some thawing body of water – money will flow where it needs to go, to secure the highest return and find its own level.
What is the magic point of convergence: of value creation, long-term commercial return, security and sustainability? Our argument is that to achieve business success you increasingly need to contribute to sustainability outcomes. To achieve sustainability requires, in turn, a new model of business success.
Business success and sustainability must go hand in hand, because issues such as climate change, access to water, food and other basic resources, human rights, community cohesion, security and the environment; issues that once we would have written off as “externalities”, which we could leave to others to pay for, are now central to global businesses of the future.
First, proactively managing these issues is critical to even being able to do business at all. Second, they increasingly impact on the nature of the products and services and the ability to manage and motivate people, which will shape what business does and how it does it. Third, they represent huge and compelling opportunities in terms of how we eat, live, travel, enjoy leisure and meet energy needs. Fourth, they can only be tackled if we harness the distinctive and dynamic capacity of business to bring together people and finance in a way that fully harnesses our skills and the potential for innovation.
It is the combinationof all these factors that means this agenda will become even more important in the face of any economic downturn, which means that business-as-usual will be a recipe for decline, that cost-cutting will only stave off the inevitable, that the basis for what we call corporate social responsibility is being fundamentally recast.
China could be in the forefront of sustainable business. Take renewable energy, for example. The renewable energy sector is set to expand to US$450 billion by 2012, and $600 billion by 2020. Global investment in renewable energy surged 60% to $148 billion last year and is still accelerating despite the slowdown in the wider economy, according to a recent UNEP report. (Wind energy attracted the biggest amount, at around $50.2 billion and solar, the fastest growing area, attracted investment of $28.6 billion. Since 2004, the global market for solar energy has grown by annual rate of 254%).
China’s renewable energy use is number one in the world. China’s reliance on hydroelectric power and wind power rank first and fifth in the world, respectively. China is likely to increase the proportion of electricity generated from renewable resources to 23% by 2020. (Only 1.3% of UK energy needs are currently met by renewable energy currently, compared to 16% in China and 39% in Sweden).
China is not only demonstrating an acute awareness of the potential of renewables, but also an impressive capacity to make it happen. According to Sweden`s Industry Daily, “China has made a smooth transition to low-carbon economy, thanks to the government’s strong policy enforcement that stimulated innovative low-carbon technologies and attracted dozens of hundred-million-dollar investments in the field %26hellip;the Chinese government started “the Low-carbon Big Dragon” initiative, which tackles issues like future economic growth, development, and energy security”.
The Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama`s recent remarks may perhaps speak to a future agenda for people and planet:
“We live in a time when our destinies are shared. The world is more intertwined than at any time in human history. Walls that divided old enemies have come down.
Markets have opened. The spread of information and technology has reduced barriers to opportunity and prosperity, and opened doors to new competition and risk.
Climate change. Poverty. Extremism. Disease. These problems offend our common humanity. They also threaten our common security. You know this. The question is what we do about it. We`re not going to face these threats of the future by grasping at the ideas of the past.”
Fast forward to April 12, 2009: 50 years to the day when President John F Kennedy speaking in Indianapolis remarked, but did not quite get right, that “When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”
Will we see a new American president, perhaps speaking in China, recognising with respect the true meaning of weiji and forging a deal that secures the funds and reaches ground-breaking new agreements on who owns and controls what in the US and beyond? This deal will set the framework to create value through sustainability, to unleash the next great wave of value generation: a partnership between China and the US that ushers in the age of sustainability.
Tony Manwaring is the chief executive of Tomorrow`s Company
Homepage photo by Petrick2008
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