4. Many environmental laws, policies and regulations are being developed or improved. Much of that cooperation stopped under President Donald Trump, who took a confrontational stance toward Beijing and questioned the science of climate change. Atlas of the Huai river basin water environment: digestive cancer mortality. Because wood provides almost all the raw material for the paper and pulp industry, and also panels and lumber for construction, there is a growing gap between China's demand for wood products and its domestic supply, especially since the national logging ban that followed the floods of 1998. As of 1995, China was home to an estimated 16,998 PII firms with a combined industrial product of about $50 billion28. To meet demand for fish products, production of aquacultured freshwater fish has increased steeply (Fig. The projected drop in household size to 2.2 people6 by the year 2030 alone would add over 250 million new households more than the total in the entire Western Hemisphere in 2000 even if China's population size remained constant. The amount of waste water discharged has increased steadily (Supplementary Fig. Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, Michigan State University, East Lansing, 48824, Michigan, USA, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, the Department of Geography, Bunche Hall, University of California, Los Angeles, 90095-1524, California, USA, You can also search for this author in China is also designing and adopting a green accounting system that includes environmental costs in the calculation of gross domestic product (or Green GDP). CFRs Yanzhong Huang discusses how Chinas environmental crisis is harming public health and undermining the Chinese government in his book Toxic Politics: Chinas Environmental Health Crisis and Its Challenge to the Chinese State. We would like to thank Kim Borland, Mason Bradbury, Xiaodong Chen, Jayson Eageler, Linda Fortin, Guangming He, Edward Laurent, Shuxin Li, Wei Liu, Zhiyun Ouyang, Nathan Pfost, William Taylor, Brent Wheat and Daniel Wieferich for their helpful assistance, and Rory Howlett and three anonymous reviewers for constructive suggestions. Human well-being, Environmental Justice, Environmental Policy and the practicalities of Sustainability in Scotland. Xie, Z. in Greening Strategy (in Chinese) (eds. The effects of globalization on the environment in China. China is the world's most populous country and the fourth largest in area. Of the 142 countries for which environmental sustainability was evaluated, China ranked 129th, higher only than Nigeria among our 15 comparison countries (Table 1). More than 60 percent of BRI-specific energy financing has gone toward nonrenewable resources. Since 1990, China has combated desertification on 24,000 km2 of land by reforestation and fixation of sand dunes10. CAS In response, Beijing has implemented policies to curb emissions and stem further degradation, such as by signing the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate and pledging to be carbon neutral by 2060. In 2003 China overtook Japan to become the second-largest consumer of petroleum after the United States9. 1. Some countries become followers in this era, and other follow trying, In some of China's largest cities globalization has had drastic effects. Deforestation is a major cause of soil erosion and flooding in China. (Norton, New York, 1995). Carousel with three slides shown at a time. The government banned the construction of new coal-fired power plants in 2016, and coal use appeared to decline. Google Scholar. Geography. A curation of original analyses, data visualizations, and commentaries, examining the debates and efforts to improve health worldwide. This alone gave China an extra 80 million households in 2000: more than the total number of households in Russia and Canada combined. (2013). China only recently started actively helping to formulate global responses to climate change. National policies are a good starting point, but only when supplemented with sustainable business practices and the support of consumers willing to do things differently than before in favor of sustainability. Socioeconomic losses. Climate change is exacerbating instability in the Horn of Africa. Liu, J. et al. PubMed It is the world's largest producer of steel, cement, aquacultured food and television sets, and is the second-largest producer of electricity and chemical textiles. PDF | On Jan 1, 2009, J. Liu and others published China's environment and globalization: Unexpected connections | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate Specific dangers. Propelled eastwards by prevailing winds, pollutant-laden dust, sand and soil from China's deserts, degraded pastures and fallow farmland blow to Korea, Japan, Pacific islands and across the Pacific within a week to the United States and Canada30. Communication and transportation advances have aided in this process. With China's entrance into the World Trade Organization (WTO), timber imports are expected to increase, because tariffs on wood products are about to be reduced from a rate of 1520% to 23%. In 1994, after the number of motor vehicles had increased to six times the 1980 figure, China decided to make car production one of its four pillar industries to stimulate economic growth, with the goal of increasing production (especially of cars) by another factor of four by 2010. The Ministry of Ecology and Environment calculated the cost of pollution to be around 1.5 trillion RMB ($227 billion), or roughly 3.5 percent of GDP, in 2010. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter what matters in science, free to your inbox daily. The Climate Action Tracker lays out Chinas commitments under the Paris Agreement and examines their effectiveness. In 2000 China led the world in SO2 emissions (Table 1) and ranked third for NOx emissions in populated areas among the major countries (Supplementary Table). For instance, from 1989 to 2002 the value of goods exported by heavily polluting TVEs increased 31-fold, including a 22-fold increase in textiles and an 18-fold increase in food29. Globalization has been imperative for sustenance of the companies and countries across the spectrum. China accounts for 15% of the world fish catch and 33% of global fish and seafood consumption3,4. A previous version of the graphic on global carbon emissions incorrectly listed the unit as metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. https://www.pnas.org/content/115/46/11850. (Most references and data sources are listed in the Supplementary Information. In sum, the toll of the global shipping industry makes the 'death footprint' of globalization's air pollution even larger. Aerial particles from China also affect the regional and global atmosphere. In 2003, the government proposed a new development concept emphasizing humanism and attempting to achieve sustainable development and harmony between man and nature, as well as coordinated socioeconomic progress among various regions and with foreign countries13. In 2020, 1.37 million so-called new energy vehicleswhich include battery electric, plug-in hybrid, and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicleswere sold in China, a nearly 11 percent increase from the previous year. The world's longest gas pipeline, the West-to-East Pipeline, began construction in July 2002 to carry gas 3,800 km from the largest reserves in western and north-central China to Shanghai on the east coast (Fig. Abstract retrieved from https://www.pnas.org/content/115/46/11850. 1). This process has make changes on many things, like: the environment, culture, economic development, political systems, societal problems All the things have two sides, globalization also has advantages and disadvantages. (PDF 44 kb), Supplementary Figure 9 Graph of industrial solid-waste production in China. Overuse has led to severe shortages, and industry along Chinas major water sources has polluted supplies. volume435,pages 11791186 (2005)Cite this article. For many years, China has been struggling to tackle high pollution levels that are crippling its major cities. Although China's per capita environmental impact is still far below that of developed countries (Table 1), the proportionate increase in total human impact on the world's environments will be enormous if China's per capita impacts catch up with such countries. Most invasive species were brought into China, intentionally or unintentionally, by international trade and other activities. Many Chinese officials and economists believe that PIIs benefit China by raising economic efficiency and reducing pollution in the long run. Much of the products, technologies, knowledge and financial support imported into China is environmentally benign or strongly beneficial. Construction of hydropower dams along major rivers has also damaged ecosystems. In per capita ecological footprint (a measure of human natural resource consumption and waste output), China is below the world average (Supplementary Table), but its total ecological footprint is the second largest in the world after the United States, owing to its population size. For decades, China resisted making commitments under the UN framework. 28), and garbage shipped via Hong Kong (Fig. From 1952 to 2003, while its total population merely doubled, its proportionate urban population tripled from 13% to 39%. When nations realize the value of energy products like oil, coal, and natural gas, they tend to over-depend on them. China has also participated in international treaties such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Millennium Development Goals, which include poverty alleviation, environmental protection and sustainable development. DOI:10.1073/pnas.1809753115. How China and the rest of the world affect each other. Ye, R. et al. Divorces hurt the environment because they double the number of households and reduce the household size, increasing per capita resource consumption and waste. 4). Many older people now live alone, rather than with their children and grandchildren. by Claire Klobucista Increased public awareness of Chinas notoriously low air quality in the past decadeespecially after Beijing suffered a prolonged bout of smog in 2013 that was so severe that citizens dubbed it an airpocalypsehas sparked government action. Also encouraging is the 1998 ban on logging and the start of the Natural Forest Conservation Program (Fig. This underlying water shortage, plus wasteful use, causes over 100 cities to suffer from severe shortages and even halts industrial production. For financial and various other reasons, it has often been impossible for China to adopt the advanced technology standards of developed nations, which in turn profit and gain competitive advantage by exporting outdated or even illegal technologies. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation (Biocomplexity in the Environment), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD39789), the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30428028). 1). China's environmental problems can be summarized under five categories: air, land, fresh water, oceans and biodiversity. However, groundwater continues to fall short of targets, with more than 80 percent categorized as bad to very bad.. As the worlds largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in recent years, China suffers from notoriously bad air pollution.