China’s high-speed railway (HSR) is the most recent poster child for the country’s rapid development, with more HSR tracks than the rest of the world combined. Since 2004, the Chinese government has invested more than 10 trillion RMB to build a 40,000-kilometer (km) network of trains that zip between stations at speeds reaching 350 km/hr (or 220 miles per hour). Not to be outdone, by 2035 the government aims to expand this train network by 75 percent to help the country reach its transport connectivity and low-carbon transportation goals. 

The slogan “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets” seemed omnipresent in China in 2015, highlighting a crucial part of Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization. Yet this powerful formulation proved vague in execution, giving local policymakers new headaches on how to strike the balance between development and conservation in making new laws. China’s judiciary faced an even stickier problem. How do you try such cases in the absence of concrete legal text and sufficient legal precedents? 

For decades, western multinational companies have been profiting by exploiting plant, animal, or microbial genetic resources obtained from less developed countries. Take the neem tree, for example. Since the 1990s, international companies have registered more than 70 patents on products derived from India’s “tree of life.” Yet these patents have prohibited local people from using these trees (as they had for centuries) to make cosmetics, fertilizers, and medicines.

International companies have now turned their eyes to the high seas in a new hunt for genetic resources. Concerned they will be left out of the potentially profitable patents once again, developing nations are demanding equitable use and benefit sharing of genetic resources in ongoing global ocean treaty negotiations.

As countries prepare to gather for the Fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in December 2022, the stakes for global biodiversity couldn’t be higher. Over the last half century, global wildlife population sizes plummeted by 60 percent. A 2019 UN report, one among many, warned that the current global response to this accelerating loss of species is insufficient and that “transformative changes are needed to restore and protect nature.”

2022 was a summer of climate extremes across the globe. Multiple heat events simmered across China and Europe, also in regions that are not “supposed to be this hot,” such as the United Kingdom. The western United States also baked in unusual heat, but perhaps the most damaging episode of the season occurred when extreme precipitation caused major flooding in Jackson, Mississippi. This untimely deluge exacerbated a pre-existing water infrastructure crisis in that city, leaving its 150,000, predominately black, residents without access to safe water for days. 

Recycling in the United States is failing. Only 50 percent of packaging is currently recycled. For plastics the rate is lower, only nine percent. The U.S. packaging recycling rate is far below many other countries and has been stagnant for over a decade because our waste management infrastructure is fragmented, inefficient, and underfunded. U.S. city and county governments spend millions of taxpayer dollars each year to manage an expanding and increasingly complex array of packaging waste they had no input in designing or creating. U.S. recyclers are struggling with poorly designed packaging that cannot be recycled and adds cost to the recycling system, and brand owners are unable to source the recycled content they need to honor their public sustainability commitments. Under the current system, consumer packaged goods companies have little incentive to change.