As garbage islands floating in the Pacific Ocean have grown to the area of entire countries, Japan and other nations’ use of plastic fishing nets is believed to not only take a major toll on sea life, but is even threatening the future of the fishing industry itself.
In the global environmental conference COP27, which is set to conclude today, much of the debate has been focused on whether or not wealthier countries should pay climate reparations to more vulnerable nations.
According to organizers, over 130,000 marched in the annual pride parade in Taipei on Saturday. Lower turnout had been expected due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and in fact numbers were down from the record 200,000 participants in the October 2019 event.
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s announcement that the Japanese nation will go net zero in terms of carbon emissions by 2050 has been widely welcomed as a step in the right direction by environmentalists and others focused on the growing threat of climate change.
Greenpeace has sounded an alarm over the Suga government’s plan to release stored water from the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, releasing a new report warning about the presence of carbon-14, which the group says “has the potential to damage human DNA.”
Nearly a decade after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the government has decided to release more than one million tons of treated radioactive water, currently being stored at the nuclear plant, into the Pacific Ocean, despite fierce opposition from fishermen and some environmentalists.
As world leaders are convening at the the World Economic Forum in Davos, critical attention is being drawn to the Japan’s largest financial institutions’ continued investments in coal, one of the main contributors to the climate crisis.
A roundup of the most significant news stories from Japan reported in the last half of December 2019.
A roundup of the most significant news stories from Japan reported in the last half of November 2019.
The Indonesian coal mining conglomerate Adaro Energy, which is allied with the Japanese companies J-Power, Itochu, as well as a number of public and private Japanese banks, has been avoiding local taxes for more than a decade, depriving the Indonesian government of about US$125 million in income from 2009 to 2017, and has even been accused of provoking human rights abuses in the country.
