Global Impact: time to ‘invest in our planet’ as Earth Day provides climate change reminder
- Global Impact is a weekly curated newsletter featuring a news topic originating in China with a significant macro impact for our newsreaders around the world
- In this edition, we mark Earth Day with a look at the latest climate change efforts
Every year since 1970, Earth Day on April 22 has served as a reminder for every citizen on the planet of their collective responsibility to help accelerate the changes needed to transition towards a greener, more sustainable and equitable society and economy.
Themed “invest in our planet”, this year’s initiatives include global open-letter signing events to promote climate literacy, support sustainable fashion, plant trees and mitigate plastic pollution.
In China, although planned activities are relatively few – most notably a handful of clean-up events in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Hangzhou – they help inspire people to reflect on how the world and China fare in the effort to mitigate climate change, which is one of the biggest environmental threats to mankind.
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Vietnam targets rice as an unlikely contributor to climate change
The Group of 7 (G7) nations, which finished two days of meetings on climate, energy and environmental policy in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo last weekend, reaffirmed their commitment to accelerating the clean-energy transition and achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
They agreed to increase solar power capacity to more than 1,000 gigawatts (GW) and offshore wind capacity to 150GW by 2030, which according to a Nikkei report amounts to a tripling in solar capacity and a seven-fold jump in offshore wind capacity from 2021 levels.