Words into action

The Sustainable Development Dialogues are home to a wide range of different initiatives - including this publication - all aimed at sparking fresh action on sustainability. Here are a few examples of projects under way.

From Nottingham to Ningbo
The University of Nottingham is setting up an Institute of Sustainable Development on its new £24 million campus in Ningbo, near Shanghai. It will be housed in a state-of-the-art eco-building designed by award-winning Italian architect (and special professor at Nottingham) Mario Cucinella, who specialises in environmental building design.

It will sit alongside a new Centre for Sustainable Energy Technologies, headed by Professor Saffa Riffat, who is well known in China for his research into innovative technologies for sustainable building, and a Centre for Environmental Management will follow. Both will partner Nottingham’s own Centre for the Environment, to develop a variety of teaching and research programmes.

The Ningbo campus is closely involved with Nottingham’s China Policy Institute (CPI) and its partners at the Sustainable Development Research Centre in the influential Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The CPI is recruiting now for a research fellowship programme in Chinese sustainable development, with an initial focus on the potential for corporate social responsibility programmes in China to help deliver the goals in the 11th Five Year Plan. “One of China’s key sustainability challenges is to develop effective, but also enforceable, policies,” says CPI director Richard Pascoe. “It needs to harness its corporate sector - both Chinese and foreign-owned - to play a much bigger role.”

Nottingham’s China campus is in Zhejiang province, which has a more developed private sector than most other regions and is one of China’s wealthiest provinces. It has therefore been chosen as one of seven Chinese provinces piloting an “eco-province” approach. The new Institute of Sustainable Development will work closely with the provincial government and its environmental protection agency, conducting policy-oriented research to bring such an approach to life. - [gfauthor]Martin Wright[/gfauthor]

Screen to screen contact
How can you have a direct, lively debate between Chinese and Western thinkers, neither of whom know each other’s language, and never even meet? That’s the question answered by www.Chinadialogue.net.

Its founder, Isabel Hilton, explains: “The germ of the idea came last year, when I read an interview with China’s deputy environment minister, Pan Yue, in which he famously warned that the country’s ‘economic miracle’ was at risk from environmental degradation [see ‘China: the most important story in the world’].

“So how can China address an environmental crisis that is growing as fast as the galloping economy? It seemed to me that we needed to open a dialogue with Chinese policy makers, environmentalists, activists and concerned citizens, to exchange ideas, news and experience. The internet was the obvious platform; the obvious obstacle was language. Our answer is a fully bilingual website on which we can publish articles from inside and outside China and, for the first time in the world, offer the possibility of direct dialogue through fully translated user comments.

“It was a technical and cultural challenge, but after several months of hard work in London and Beijing, the site went live in early July at www.chinadialogue.net. It is now possible for English and Chinese speakers to debate environmental issues on the internet without needing to know each others’ language; to discover each others’ points of view; and to share ideas, argue and explore solutions together.

“In the first week, we had visits to the site that spanned the globe, from the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to the US, Europe, India and, of course, China. Come and visit - and join the debate!”

Isabel Hilton is a writer and broadcaster, and editor of Chinadialogue.net

A school for sustainability
China’s astonishing economic growth, combined with its environmental crisis, poses a major challenge to the thinking of some of its traditional political institutions. Specifically, there is a real lack of practical training in environmental policy making which can combine an understanding of green technology, sustainable business modelling and political reform. In an effort to remedy this, the Chinese Communist Party School is collaborating with the Global Environmental Institute on a new curriculum in “market-based approaches to sustainable environmental development”. Drawing on case studies from China and overseas, it will cover four key areas:

• Tools for environmental protection, notably incentives and regulatory instruments
• Urban smart growth principles and practices
• Rural sustainable development models
• Market mechanisms for sustainable energy development.

A chemistry between them...
Nearly half of China’s chemical plants - most of which lie along rivers or in densely populated areas - pose a significant risk to the environment, according to SEPA. If the country is to avoid more disastrous accidents like those which have happened recently, its chemicals industry needs to hit the fast track to sustainability.

As part of the Dialogues, Defra is supporting plans for a range of seminars, study tours, scholarships, secondments and training for the Chinese chemicals industry, involving everyone from young professionals to CEOs. Alongside this, it is developing a pilot project on the ‘circular economy’ - helping Chinese companies, including SMEs, learn from some of the best UK practice in resource efficiency and waste minimisation. This will draw on a number of successful schemes such as EnvWorks, Envirowise and the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme, all of which have helped industry reduce both their costs and their environmental impact.

2 November 2006

Isabel Hilton