Despite rollicking economic growth—which reached a ten-year high in the second quarter of 2006—China is making little progress in “rebalancing” its underlying economic structure in favour of more equal and sustainable wealth creation, according to a World Bank Quarterly Update on China.

"The desired shift in production from industry towards services, more reliance on domestic demand, more equally shared growth and more environmentally sustainable growth that are aimed for in the 11th FYP (Five Year Plan) is yet to begin,” notes the August 2006 Update.

Green River (绿色江河), an independent conservation NGO based in Sichuan, is recruiting volunteers to spend the summer travelling the new Qinghai-Tibet railway line educating passengers about the ecology of the Tibet plateau.

Publicly naming and shaming industrial polluters and scoring county governments for their environmental performance feature in the plans of a new NGO established in May by an internationally renowned Chinese activist.

China’s environmental NGOs are an “indispensable force” that is likely to grow by 10-15% annually (in terms of both the number of organisations and the number of staff working for them), with steadily greater collaboration and multi-sectoral working approaches, according to a report released by the All-China Environmental Federation (ACEF).

The surge in private car ownership in China—from one million vehicles in 1994 to 16 million in 2004—is “fast eroding the quality of urban life and the efficiency of urban economic activities,” according to a hard-hitting World Bank Working Paper on urban transport released this week.

Efforts to end the trade in illegal timber across the Yunnan–Burma border have been boosted by a Yunnan Provincial Government order to close the porous frontier to all timber, accompanied by a call for Chinese migrant loggers to return from Burma.

Village doctor Zhang Changjian (张长建) has just had his clinic closed by local authorities. His offence? A decade of activism, trying to draw government and media attention to a wave of illness that, he claims, is caused by a local chemical plant. Tina Qian (钱霄峰) listened to his story.

Two relatively well established and well-known independent organizations, Beijing’s Institute for Environment and Development (IED) and the Fuping (富平) Vocational Training School, have merged to form a new Fuping Development Institute, against the trend of China’s non-profit sector development which has previously been marked by more divorces than marriages.

International accolades for two Chinese environmental advocates have underlined growing global interest—and, perhaps, unrealistically great expectations—vested in China’s fledgling environmental movement.

Writer and activist, Ma Jun, is ranked by Time magazine this month as among “100 People Who Shape Our World” while NGO leader, Yu Xiaogang, has been awarded a USD 125,000 Goldman Environmental Prize that has been styled a “green Nobel Prize.” Both men are critics of China’s water resource management.

Research, public education and pilot interventions on the linkages between environmental pollution and human health will form the core of a China grant-making program by the US-based Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which is resuming operations in Southern China after a three-year hiatus during which the foundation reassessed its global priorities.