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(BEIJING) - Nearly eight out of 10 Chinese coastal city sewers discharged excessive amounts of pollutants into the sea in the first six months of the year, state media said on Saturday. Most of the outlets were "improperly arranged", Xinhua news agency said, with 43 percent in tourist, sea farming and other reserved areas and 33 percent in harbour and shipping areas. Rapidly growing China is poised to overtake the United States as the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases, and Beijing faces rising international calls to accept mandatory caps on carbon dioxide emissions from factories and vehicles. Water pollution...

(BEIJING) - Chinese farmers besieged a brewery to protest against pollution and being left out in the economic cold -- common complaints in the China's restive countryside -- local people said on Sunday. Villagers in the southwest province Sichuan blocked the gate of the brewery and a nearby road close to Shifang city on Thursday and Friday demanding that officials and executives resolve their grievances, locals told Reuters by phone. "There's been a lot of trouble," said one villager who gave her family name as Huang. "They weren't listening and so we blocked the road." The villagers' complaints could not...

(HEFEI) -- Huaihe River, China's third longest, is seriously polluted due to excessive discharges of industrial and daily waste, according to a report from the Huaihe River Committee. An excessive influx of industrial waste from the provinces along the river is the major source of contamination, said Wang Bin, deputy director of the committee under the Ministry of Water Resources, quoting a report examining the chemical oxygen demand (COD) and other chemical contents in the river in 2006. The amount of COD, ammonia and nitrogen, the main indexes to determine the water quality, in the river has far exceeded the...

GUANGZHOU: Guangdong Province must do more to prevent pollution in the estuary area of the Pearl River, which runs into the South China Sea, officials said. Li Zhujiang, director of the Guangdong oceanic and fishery administration, said yesterday that the Pearl River estuary had been damaged by years of ineffective protection measures. "The water near the shore has been seriously polluted by industrial, agricultural and urban waste," Li said. According to a recent research report by Li's department, Guangdong discharged 2.35 billion tons of industrial waste-water into the sea last year, of which only about 84 percent met pollution-control standards....

Deep in the Guangdong province of China, I met a woman I won't soon forget. Wearing a straw hat and carrying a sickle, Zhu Chuuyun is a farmer, growing rice like many in her village...... She told me it all started when the water in her village turned red. First the red water claimed her crops, and then it stole away her husband. He died an awful death, suffering for more than a year before finally succumbing to cancer. The problem, as she described it to me, is that the Hengshui River, which provides the only water to her village,...

It is ironic for a highly polluted town to be repeatedly crowned with titles for its environmental "achievements." Dawang Town in Shandong Province is totally unworthy of its title as one of the most livable places in China and one of the most beautiful town in the country. Today the town is one of the most important industrial towns in Shandong Province. With many highly polluting factories but poor pollution control, it has become one of the most polluted towns in China, says People's Daily on July 18. In the last 10 years, the town has received more than 100...

BEIJING: China has stopped the public release of an official study adding up the cost of the nation's environmental damage, a government researcher told a Chinese newspaper, blaming official reluctance to confront pollution. The Beijing News reported Monday that the release of a "green GDP" report computing the cost of pollution and ecological degradation in 2005 had been "indefinitely postponed." Wang Jinnan, a senior expert at the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning who was technical head of the project, said that publicly spelling out the cost of bad air, water and soil had drawn fierce opposition from local officials eager...

Many of the environmental disasters erupting in the country could have been avoided, or at least wouldn't have been so bad, if there was strong public environmental awareness. One example is the recent public protest against the PX chemical plant planned for Xiamen in East China's Fujian Province. The plan has to be changed under heavy pressure from local residents who fear possible health hazards of the giant chemical plant in the scenic city. Meanwhile, construction of the Shanghai-Hangzhou maglev also seems to have been stopped, at least for the moment, due to the strong protest of people living along...

Hong Kong could begin to feel the pinch of increased water demand in the mainland as early as five years from now, an academic has warned. Hong Kong University associate professor of geography Frederick Lee Yok-shiu said he estimates mainland authorities may decrease the supply to Hong Kong in favor of Pearl River Delta cities such as Shenzhen, Dongguan and Guangzhou within the next five to seven years. "Five, six, or seven years down the line, increasing competition may lead to a change in the way water (from Guangdong) is going to be distributed among the different cities," Lee told...

<p>Hundreds of millions of people fall ill every year or die prematurely from air and water pollution caused by China's breakneck economic growth, one of the world's leading economic thinktanks has concluded following an 18-month investigation.</p> <p>China's water quality causes the researchers great concern. One third of the length of all China's rivers are now "highly polluted" as are 75% of its major lakes and 25% of all its coastal waters. Nearly 30,000 children die from diarrhoea due to polluted water each year.</p>

<p>It was only when pollution literally started to bloom across the lakes of China earlier this summer that the country's leaders finally sounded full alarm on the environment.</p> <p>Blue-green algae blooms choked Lake Taihu - China's third biggest source of freshwater - in May, forcing 5 million people to use bottled water for drinking and bathing.</p>

The Chinese government has been accused of attempting to cover up nearly three quarters of a million deaths caused by rampant pollution. Chinese officials reportedly tried to censor a World Bank document that found filthy air and water prematurely kill 750,000 people every year in China. One woman told Sky News that people in her village are paying for the pollution with their lives. Wei Dongying took us down the Qiantang River in a tiny fishing at night, as flashes of lightning lit up the huge expanse of water. An overpowering stench of chemicals and a thick slick of foam...

GUANGZHOU (Reuters) - Leaders of the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou led thousands in a "swimathon" across the Pearl River on Sunday to trumpet its recent cleanup -- at a time of mounting water pollution crises across the country. Guangzhou Mayor Zhang Guangning fired a starter's gun before leading more than 3,500 people in a much hyped swim across the river, China's third longest, whose lower reaches had been seriously polluted by rapid industrialization. The swim, an annual event, was abandoned in the 1970s because of the chronic pollution and resurrected only last year. Years of promoting economic growth at...

BEIJING, July 15 (Xinhua) -- Climate change linked to the contraction of wetlands at the source of China's two longest rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River, has reduced the volume of water flowing in the rivers, said Chinese scientists. Scientists from the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) studied changes over the past 40 years to the wetlands on the cold Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in west China where the two rivers have their source. Analyzing aerial photos and satellite remote sensing figures, they found that the wetlands on the plateau have shrunk more...

China has ordered hotels in the capital to keep rooms no cooler than 26 degrees in summer and no warmer than 20 degrees in the winter in a bid to save energy. Beijing Vice-Mayor Ding Xiangyang said the orders had to be obeyed, unlike previous schemes in which hotels were urged gently. Beijing's consumption of power is increasing every year, and its hotel industry is a major consumer of electricity. All hotels with Olympics contracts were urged to meet state standards for "green hotels" before the end of this year. "The standards require hotels to use water-saving equipment, install power-saving...

For the past two weeks residents living around China's second largest lake have been able to smell a rat—make that two billion rats. When the Yangtze River flooded on June 23, the water level rose in Dongting Lake, which sits along the river south of Wuhan in central China's Hunan Province. The flooding began flushing out rat holes around the lake, triggering a literal rat race for higher ground. Since then farming communities in more than 20 counties near Dongting have been overrun, observers say. "For the past week, the situation has been very serious," Tan Lulu, who works for...

Beijing -- Developed countries are hypocritical for criticising China's greenhouse gas emissions while buying products from its booming manufacturing industry, the Chinese government said. The comments yesterday were aimed at defending the country's environmental record after a report said it had become the world's top carbon dioxide emitter. China overtook the US in carbon dioxide emissions by about 7.5 per cent in 2006, according to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency's report this week. While China was 2 per cent below the US in carbon dioxide emissions in 2005, voracious coal consumption and increased cement production caused the numbers to rise...

China’s emergence as the world’s biggest polluter will intensify the pressure it feels from the rest of the world to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, climate campaigner Al Gore says. Figures released this week showed that China might already have overtaken the US as the biggest emitter of the main gas, carbon dioxide. “I think that when China is recognised as the largest emitter — it may have happened this week or it may happen next year — it will produce a subtle but significant change in the pressure China feels from the rest of the world to be part...

For millennia China's great rivers have snaked their long meandering courses across the country, providing lifeblood for Chinese civilisation. Along the banks of the Yellow River to the north and the Yangtze to the south, five thousand years of history and culture have unfolded, with agriculture flourishing in otherwise inhospitable terrain and trade bringing prosperity and dynamism in its wake. But the effects of chronic pollution, large-scale damming and climate change are combining to spell catastrophe for the rivers. Ten per cent of the Yellow River today is sewage. Little surprise when, according to the government, the volume of wastewater...

China said yesterday that it is unfair for rich countries to buy its cheap goods and then condemn its greenhouse gas pollution, a day after one study suggested the nation was already the world's biggest carbon dioxide emitter. Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said other countries need to consider China's role as a low-cost export powerhouse that in effect helps rich Western consumers avoid emissions at home. "China is now the factory of the world," Qin told a regular news briefing in Beijing. "The developed countries have moved a lot of manufacturing to China. What many Western consumers wear, live...