Recent Articles
Many New Zealand businesses, especially those that export, are dependent on New Zealand keeping its clean, green image to a high standard. Once, New Zealand was the cleanest nation in the world. But today, says lobby group Pure Advantage, we're quietly slipping down rankings on just about every environmental and economic performance indicator.
Two graduate students are the recipients of the 2012 Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy's research prize fellowship.
P.J. Simmons, co-author of The Green to Gold Business Playbook, discusses why companies should consider the environment at the forefront of their business strategies with Green is Good hosts John Shegerian and Mike Brady.
Many types of aerosol particles circulate in the atmosphere, but one of the most damaging to human health is known as PM2.5, a technical term for microscopic bits of matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter. These small pollutants, which come mostly from burning fossil fuels and biomass, can lodge deep in the lungs, where they exacerbate a variety of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Not all countries have ground-based monitoring systems that measure such fine-grained pollutants. Satellites offer a perspective on PM2.5 that is particularly useful when ground instruments are unavailable or offer limited information.
The Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy (YCELP) announced today Vanessa Lamers and Xin Zhang as the two recipients of its 2012 student research prize competition. Lamers and Zhang, both students at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, will each receive a $7,500 Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy Research Prize Fellowship.
Just months after the COP17 climate change conference in Durban where South Africa flaunted its "green" credentials, international research indicates the country's natural environment has deteriorated rapidly in the past 20 years. The announcement in February of the findings of the 2012 Environmental Performance Index was greeted with dismay by local environmental non-governmental organisations.
To celebrate Climate Week, Britain’s biggest climate change campaign, from March 12 - 18, we have decided to find out where the greenest holiday destinations are in the sun, so that if you are going to travel to somewhere hot and sunny, you can at least make sure it’s to somewhere with a good environmental performance rating. We’ve come up with a list of the top five hot and sunny green countries, based on the Environmental Performance Index figures released by Yale University.
U.S. energy industries, from oil and gas to ethanol, wind, and solar, have long enjoyed lavish government subsidies and other support. But those days are coming to an end. Subsidies, while they have their place, can create disincentives for becoming lean and competitive. One reason that clean energy tends to be more expensive than fossil fuel is that it can be. As long as it's subsidized, there is little pressure to compete on price. To be competitive and sustainable, alternative energy sources must ultimately match — or outperform — fossil fuels on price and performance. It's not sufficient for the world's new energy sources to be clean; ultimately, they have to be cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable than fossil fuels.
Environmental policies must be carefully structured and predictable if they are to enhance rather than undermine competitiveness. On this score the United States falls woefully short. Its climate policy in particular has been adrift during the nearly two decades since the U.S. ratified the 1992 UN Convention on Climate Change. Without a coherent framework for pricing greenhouse gas emissions, American companies have been unable to make rational decisions about investments that carry significant energy implications, such as spending on factories, equipment, and product design. This uncertainty has cast a pall over the entire U.S. economy. It has dampened innovation and put U.S. companies at a serious disadvantage when competing with businesses in countries where clear policies have sharpened the corporate focus on waste and inefficiency and spurred innovation.
The Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy is accepting proposals for its first annual student research prize. The Center will award up to two $7,500 prizes to two students – graduate or doctoral – at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies for proposals that offer the most promising combination of original research and potential environmental policy impact.
US scientists have used satellite data to create the first estimates of ground-level particulate pollution in China.
The UAE has the cleanest environment in the GCC, according to the Environmental Performance Index (EPI). The biennial survey, carried out by Yale University in collaboration with Columbia University, ranks countries from across the world based on 22 performance indicators in ten policy categories.
South Asian countries have apparently flunked the global Environmental Performance Index (EPI) examination for 2012, with India faring the worst for the quality of air that its 1.2 billion people breathe.
You may think the air is bad in Los Angeles, but researchers say it's worse in India and Bangladesh. A new study released at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, found that India had the worst air pollution in the world, followed by Bangladesh and Nepal. The United States ties with a slew of other countries for first place, including Japan and Argentina.
On a cold morning, when the mist rises over the canals that criss-cross the countryside, spreading over the woods and flatlands, the Netherlands does not feel like a sink-hole of pollution. But the ice-encrusted water is brimming with nitrates and phosphates, and the air is clogged with particulate matter.
“PM2.5” seems an odd and wonky term for the blogosphere to take up, but that is precisely what has happened in China in recent weeks. It refers to the smallest solid particles in the atmosphere—those less than 2.5 microns across. Such dust can get deep into people’s lungs; far deeper than that rated as PM10. Yet until recently China’s authorities have revealed measurements only for PM10. When people realised this, an online revolt broke out.
India’s has the worst air pollution in the entire world, beating China, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, according to a study released during this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos.
When the EU agreed to reaffirm its commitment to the Kyoto Protocol to reduce emissions and combat climate change, scientists and environmentalists must have been relieved that at least someone got how important global warming was. Despite apparent good intentions, things seem to be going nowhere. The 2012 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), shows how certain European countries are not doing more to (literally) "save the environment".
India’s price for rapid economic expansion is having the most toxic air in the world, according to a study by Columbia and Yale Universities, which has ranked 132 nations on an Environmental Performance Index.
As the Yale-Columbia rankings of national environmental performance have evolved, some countries have moved rapidly upward (or downward, in the case of the United States).