Greening East Asia

East Asia hosts a fifth of the world’s population and consumes over half the world’s coal, a quarter of its petroleum products, and a tenth of its natural gas. It also produces a third of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, making it a major contributor to climate change. The region—whose countries share ecological, sociocultural, and political characteristics while varying in size, resource wealth, history, and political systems—offers excellent insights into the complex dynamics influencing environmental politics, advocacy, and policy. With essays addressing Japan after Fukushima, coal plants and wind turbines in China, environmental activism in Taiwan, and sustainable rural development in South Korea, Greening East Asia explores a region’s shift from development to “eco-development” in acknowledgment that environmental sustainability is a critical component of economic growth.

Introduction : the evolution of the East Asian eco-developmental state / Mary Alice Haddad, Stevan Harrell -- East Asian environmental advocacy / Mary Alice Haddad -- China's low-carbon energy strategy / Joanna Lewis -- Energy and climate change policies of Japan and South Korea / Eunjung Lim -- The politics of pollution emissions trading in China / Iza Ding -- Legal experts and environmental rights in Japan / Simon Avenell -- Local energy initiatives in Japan / Noriko Sakamoto -- Indigenous conservation and post-disaster reconstruction in Taiwan / Sasala Taiban, Hui-nien Lin,Kurtis Jia-chyi Pei, Dau-jye Lu, Hwa-sheng Gau -- Nature for nurture in urban Chinese childrearing / Rob Efird -- Sustainability of Korea's first "New Village" / Chung Ho Kim -- Environmentalism in China's Chengdu Plain / Daniel Benjamin Abramson -- Environmental activism in Kaohsiung, Taiwan / Hua-mei Chiu -- Indigenous attitudes toward nuclear waste in Taiwan / Hsi-wen Chang -- The battle over GMOs in Korea and Japan / Yves Tiberghien -- Grassroots NGOs and environmental activism in China / Jingyun Dai, Anthony Spires -- The eco-developmental state and the environmental Kuznets curve / Stevan Harrell.

One of Asia's best-respected writers on business and economy, Hong Kong-based author Mark L. Clifford provides a behind-the-scenes look at what companies in China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand are doing to build businesses that will lessen the environmental impact of Asia's extraordinary economic growth. Dirty air, foul water, and hellishly overcrowded cities are threatening to choke the region's impressive prosperity. Recognizing a business opportunity in solving social problems, Asian businesses have developed innovative responses to the region's environmental crises. From solar and wind power technologies to green buildings, electric cars, water services, and sustainable tropical forestry, Asian corporations are upending old business models in their home countries and throughout the world. Companies have the money, the technology, and the people to act—yet, as Clifford emphasizes, support from the government (in the form of more effective, market-friendly policies) and the engagement of civil society are crucial for a region-wide shift to greener business practices. Clifford paints detailed profiles of what some of these companies are doing and includes a unique appendix that encapsulates the environmental business practices of more than fifty companies mentioned in the book.

This book aims to analyze the impact of green growth and low carbon development on the transformation of energy systems and international trade and to evaluate the environmental and economic consequences of such policies in Northeast Asia. Green Growth and Low Carbon Development in East Asia, thereby, uncovers the limitations and challenges of advancing sustainable development world-wide.

Why has East Asia emerged as the global leader in green energy industries but - until recently - lagged on carbon emission reduction? What is new and distinctive about East Asia's approach to the green energy transition? And what does this approach mean for the world? Developmental Environmentalism provides the first comprehensive account of East Asia's green energy shift. It highlights the powerful and symbiotic role of state ambition, geostrategic competition, and capitalist market dynamics in driving forward the region's greening efforts. Through an analysis of the ambitious national strategies of China and South Korea, the authors show how state actors have pursued a distinctively East Asian approach to transforming their energy systems, involving first the rapid creation of new green energy industries and then the coordinated destruction of fossil-fuel incumbencies. This approach - described as 'Developmental Environmentalism' - is aimed at establishing East Asian economies as leaders in the green industries of the future, while at the same time addressing the pressing environmental, social and political problems associated with the carbon-intensive industries of the past. By developing four detailed, longitudinal case studies of green industry creation and fossil-fuel phase out in China and Korea, the authors identify the key successes and failures of East Asia's green shift to date and anticipate its most likely future trajectory. Based on their findings, the authors reject the idea that East Asia's greening strategies are mere exercises in 'greenwashing' or fossil-fuelled 'business as usual'. Rather, there is something fundamentally transformative underway in the region at the level of elite ideation, strategic ambition, and policy action; the green energy shift represents much more than continuity in Asia's erstwhile developmental states. To execute their analysis, the authors synthesise insights from cutting-edge Developmental State and Schumpeterian theorising. They show how state actors in East Asia are engaging in a sophisticated kind of economic statecraft, strategically harnessing the capitalist market dynamics of 'creative-destruction' to advance their transformative green ambitions through green growth. They also assess the implications of developmental environmentalism for developed and developing countries, and the future of the global green shift in an era of geostrategic rivalry.

This volume is a practical guide that helps the reader build a quick, evidence-based understanding of green-growth strategies and challenges. Its cogent analysis of real-life case studies enables policy makers and company executives identify successful strategies they can adopt, and pitfalls they can avoid, in drafting and implementing green growth policies. The contributors’ empirical assessment of these studies identifies the structural conditions required for economic growth to be compatible with environmental sustainability and how the transition to a new economic paradigm should be managed. A crucial addition to the debate now beginning in earnest around the world, this volume attempts to understand how we can nurture a new-born model of sustainable growth and help it evolve to maturity.

This report took a case study approach in order to identify key elements of best practice cases to improve water scarcity management under increased uncertainty associated with a changing climate

This timely book offers a critical account of key governance challenges of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Illustrating China’s efforts to expand its idea of a sustainable eco-civilization, thereby ‘greening’ the BRI, it explores the disputes that have emerged from this process and subsequent complications resulting from geopolitical competition.