Sustainability
Afghanistan and Iran: From water treaty to water dispute
With an estimated 75 billion cubic metres (BCM) of water annually, Afghanistan is, on paper, a self-sufficient water country. However, the country also “has one of the lowest…
Chinese dams and the Mekong drought
The latest reports from the Lower Mekong Basin are cause for growing concern that another period of drought will succeed that of 2019, affecting Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and…
Chinese trawlers in the Galapagos: The protection challenge
The Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR) covers 133,000 square kilometres and was established in 1998 to protect the remarkable biodiversity of the Galapagos Islands off the coast of…
India-China relations and the geopolitics of water
The Tibetan plateau is often called the “Third Pole”, owing to its glacial expanses and vast reserves of freshwater. For as many as nine countries in the surrounding region, the…
A nervous watch on the Three Gorges Dam
To understand China, it’s not a bad idea to keep an eye on what is happening inside the country. Much of the current international discussion about China focuses on China’s plans…
The goals for Australia to do better
Although the idea is hard to bear, we now all know that Australia’s 2019–20 bushfire catastrophe and the Covid-19 crisis will not be one-off historical events. Public health…
Japanese whaling is down but not out
Even before the coronavirus pandemic began to dominate the news, and as Australia’s bush fires took most of the media oxygen, this past summer was an unusually quiet period in the…
If a tree falls in Nepal, will anyone care?
For all its natural attributes, Nepal is considered a country that provides a template for what not to do, ecologically.
Officials from neighbouring states will quietly admit to…
Should you lie to your children about reality?
Is the world currently too awful to contemplate for the so-called “snowflake generation”, which apparently can’t face the realities of life in even the most fortunate of nations?…
China’s carbon emissions trading scheme: Smoke and mirrors
Chinese officials have recently given some important indications about the design of China’s much-anticipated – and much-hyped – national carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS),…