Like bamboo sprouts after the rain, nuclear reactors are going up quickly across China. There are 36 reactors under development, and Beijing can approve as many as 10 new ones a year. Within a decade, China will likely pass the United States—which has 93 operating commercial nuclear reactors at 54 power plants—as the world’s biggest generator of nuclear power.

The construction boom across Southeast Asia, driven by burgeoning urban development and infrastructure projects, vividly highlights the dual impacts of progress. For instance, the rapid expansion of road networks, ports, and urban centers, while catalyzing economic growth, has also led to significant environmental and social displacement. These projects rely heavily on sand, a fundamental component of concrete and asphalt, extracted in vast quantities from local riverbeds. Annually, this global demand reaches approximately 50 billion tons, positioning sand as the world’s most consumed resource after water. In the Vietnamese Mekong Delta alone, 50 million cubic meters of sand are extracted annually.

Back in 2020, Shiyang Li at Rare visited restaurants across China to interview over 30 different owners and staff about the attitudes, beliefs, and everyday behaviors that contribute to food waste.  Similar to global trends, food waste in China remains a significant challenge. A 2020 survey found restaurants in Chinese cities wasted at least 34 million tons of food every year, which can feed as many as 49 million people.

During a visit to Vietnam in November 2023, I cringed as my aunt tossed our now empty bánh mì plastic bag onto the sidewalk. “It doesn’t really matter,” she shrugged, “there aren’t any nearby trash cans anyway.” Finding a trash can wouldn’t have helped much, as two-thirds of Vietnam’s plastic waste ends up burnt, landfilled, or leaked.

Around 8.5 million pangolins are estimated to have been trafficked from Africa between 2014 and 2021, with many ending up in China

In March 2019, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and China’s National Forestry and Grassland Administration co-hosted two workshops on reducing wildlife trafficking in Kenya and Botswana. These workshops, supported by the Chinese embassies in Nairobi and Gaborone, attracted over 200 Chinese nationals working for state-owned or private companies in the two countries. During the workshops, the international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and Chinese government officials expressed their shared goal of reducing the illegal trade of products from rare and endangered African species to China, one of the world’s largest markets for trafficked wildlife products.

On April 18, 2016, I was on the train with my Friends of Nature (FON) colleagues for a work trip when a shocking piece of news erupted on social media: hundreds of students in Jiangsu Province fell ill after moving into a newly built middle school. Reported symptoms included itchy skin with rashes and lesions, coughing, and a decline in white blood cell count. Students and parents later learned that their beautiful new school was built next to a contaminated site, previously home to three chemical manufacturing facilities, the largest of which had produced pesticides for decades. After these companies closed, a company contracted by the local government to clean up the site failed to properly collect and dispose of toxins in the soil. These toxins leaked into the air and sickened the students.

High in the remote mountains of western Fujian Province, Changkou—part of Sanming Prefectural City—became the first village to launch a new forestry carbon ticket system in May 2021. Changkou farmers have long received little benefit in managing forests because of fragmented forest land, high investment risks, and limited ownership rights. To solve those problems, the Sanming Forestry Bureau issued tickets to forestry farmers, granting them the right to receive stocks on their plots of forests by cooperating with farms in a certain period. Meanwhile, the carbon tickets grant farmers the right to earn carbon emission credits for their land and trees.

Food takeaway has become a symbol of urban lifestyle convenience in China, but the resulting single-use plastic (SUP) waste has become a costly environmental and economic burden. In 2020, urbanites ordering on food delivery apps generated 37 billion SUP containers and a small fraction was recycled. According to a report by Pacific Environment, 88.5% of SUP waste in China is landfilled, incinerated, or leaked to the environment. Food and beverage packaging is the number one contributor to China’s SUPs.