Thursday, June 19, 2008

Through the Looking Glass - lightly





















A month has gone by with no postings, apologies for being
incommunicado. I use the title of "Through the Looking Glass" referring to Lewis Carrol's story after Alice in Wonderland, and to connote the kind of futuristic tone that so much of my work these days revolves around. This I say "lightly" in response my contention with the over-archingly apocalyptic tone of recent media reports, particularly from the West, predicting humanity's immanent self destruction. The problems facing the world are dire, however viable solutions are being crafted by intelligent and well-meaning people around the world. It is my grand hope that people working "on the ground" to enact changes related to the environment, human equality, peace, and freedom, may some day soon be sitting in positions of government power, instead of shunned to the margins of civic life - what a novel concept!!!!

“有朋自远方来,不亦乐户" 孔子说。
Confucius said: "Nothing brings more pleasure than a friend visting from far away"
Other things keeping my away the internet, other than working for global peace, include my friend Chris' visit from Washington DC where we toured Beijing and Shanghai and had a fantastic and memory-filled time experiencing the sights of China. A few highlights include a beautiful Great Wall Hike, a strangely homo-erotic and perilous Chinese Acrobatics show, several long walks down dark hutongs in search of bars, me forgetting a brush in Shanghai and taking "bad hair day" to a new level, an awesome boat tour to the mouth of the Yangtze River, drinks at Yifeng Elite and Cloud 9 in Shanghai, Chris' poor belly taking the hits of Chinese cuisine, to name a few.

eraA New era of environmental progress in China


I have been insanely busy as I have become involved in several aspects of China's burgeoning environmental policy movement. Chinese society and Chinese government are actively working to address many of the environmental side-effects of their recent rapid economic development.

In addition to the plastic bag ban, which is a very progressive law enacted on June 1 2008, there is also
2003’s Environmental Impact Assessment Law that requires public participation in construction and land-development decision making, with the aim of making economic development more environmentally sustainable through the involvement of local stakeholders. Next, the 2008 Measures on Open Environmental Information is a sweeping new policy that requires enterprises to disclose environmental pollutant information and records of discharge quantity violations. By mandating disclosure of discharge amounts, citizens gain access to previously withheld data on local companies’ environmental performance, and are thus able to more fully participate in environmental management.

My Recent Activities

First, my dissertation which I am writing based on on-going partnership with the
Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy at the Chinese Academy of Science. My dissertation looks at the intersection of investment policy, infrastructure development and water resources by examining rural investment patterns into irrigation infrastructure in northern China over the last 20 years. We followed the investment records of 70 villages in three different provinces (Henan, Hebei, and Ningxia) and took account of modes of water resource governance, fiscal management, water allocation and water use behavior, agricultural crop water use, and agricultural productivity. Look forward to reading a riveting dissertation on our analysis in months (years!) to come.

Next, I began working for a local Chinese NGO here in Beijing called Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE). IPE is known for hold companies accountable for their pollution activities by publicly disclosing polluting company's names. Read more here:

China Water Pollution Map and China Air Pollution Map are two public interest databases developed by IPE. Through two websites (www.ipe.org.cn and air.ipe.org.cn), the databases make information about local water and air quality easily accessible to the public.

IPE has expanded its existing list of water and air pollution violators into a comprehensive account of violators’ discharge activities including violating companies’ names, locations, and discharge amounts, all based on government-sourced records. Due to expanded disclosure of polluters by the government, the number of records of violators has topped 22,000. The search engine function of the websites allows users to check whether a company operating in China is openly listed by government agencies as polluters from 2004 to 2008.

IPE is led my a very famous environmentalist here in China named Ma Jun. It has been my privilege and honor to work with Ma Jun and other brilliant IPE colleagues on a new project that adds another element to the pollution accountability strategy, that is linking polluting Chinese suppliers to their multinational partners. We are developing a new tool that holds multinationals accountable for all the pollution violators in their supply chains, and we use our access to the media to make sure multinationals are aware of their "dirty supply chain" partners. We are doing this in partnership with several large multinationals who indeed want to address these sorts of issues. We hope to launch this project in August or September.

As if that all wasn't enough, a few friends and I are also making a short documentary on what China will look like in the future for ABC News.
http://earth2100.tv Look for our video in coming weeks, which may make it on to Prime Time in Fall 2008.