The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) have announced it will organize Bangkok Car Free Day 2019, to be held on September 22 2019. The aim is to reduce traffic congestion, pollution and save energy and encourage motorists to give up their cars for a day and to use public transportation. BMA hope that campaign will see some motorists to change their travel mode choice to reduce the use of fuel and to decrease the impact of global warming.

As Northern China ramps up is factory output, by increasing industrial production, the environment is paying a price. During a presentation at the CLSA Investors’ Forum in Hong Kong on Tuesday, pollution levels had climbed by 6.5% from October to March in 2019. Heavy industrial production were pushing up coal consumptionand greenhouse gas emissions. In Beijing, industrial production of cement, metals, pig iron, steel products and thermal power – all of which emit carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas – saw sharp increases in the October to March period, against sharp declines a year earlier.

The UK will host UN climate talks in Glasgow next year, a move that hands Britain a crucial diplomatic role in helping determine the outcome of the Paris climate agreement. The location, announced by foreign secretary Dominic Raab on Tuesday, underscores the UK’s efforts to make climate policy a centrepiece of its foreign policy agenda — which has been largely dominated by Brexit over the past three years.

As a cub insurance reporter 20-odd years ago I remember being shocked by the brutal economic theory of one old underwriting hand. Amid a cyclical trough in reinsurance pricing, after premiums had been driven down to unsustainable levels by cut-throat competition, he quipped that what the market really needed was a big catastrophe to trigger price rises. Ideally something like a passenger jet flying into a New York skyscraper.

The number of institutional investors committed to cutting fossil fuel stocks from their portfolios has risen from 180 in 2014 to more than 1,100 now, as activists turn up the heat on companies over climate change. The number of fossil fuel divestments have risen dramatically since the 2015 Paris agreement on combating climate change. In 2014, investors with a total $52bn in assets under management had agreed to shed their fossil fuel holdings.

China have been mentioned alongside India as the world’s most populous countries with the highest C02 emissions, where rapid economic growth is driving an upsurge in the number of privately owned vehicles. In order for electric vehicles to be truly sustainable, they will have to be powered by clean energy, China is falling short as they continue to rely heavily on coal for electricity generation. Over half of China’s domestically generated electricity is still produced by the burning of coal and China remains the planet’s largest producer and consumer of coal, as well as the world’s largest user of coal-derived electricity.

Near Dazhang, President Xi Jinping has sought to turn hundreds of square kilometres of wetlands into an “eco-city” called Xiong’an, putting additional pressure on the area to clean up. This pet project is supposed to run on renewable energy and to eventually attract some $300bn in high-tech investment. For now, however, it is no more than a collection of billboards and hastily assembled offices in soggy wheat fields. Meanwhile, climate campaigners worry that the country’s economic slowdown is creating a renewed incentive for bureaucrats to look the other way on the environment.

A report published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences found that air pollution absorbs and disperses sunlight, thereby reducing the amount that reaches the Earth’s surface. China is the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic but at the same time, the country remains one of the most populated and rapidly developing regions in the world thanks to its ever increasing population and human activity.

The article highlights how China, currently considered the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, is still unable to meet one of the major requirements of the Paris Climate Agreement. This is due to the trade war with the United States, which has put the country’s economy under pressure - as China relies on fossil fuels, it is therefore difficult for them to make adjustments, particularly in light of their slowing economy.

The attention of EU industrial giants is focused on the carbon market, fluctuating before the Brexit. Let’s fight for China to have the same carbon limits, as European companies, to get cleaner! Speculators are hoping to reap a windfall by shorting the EU carbon market as traders bet that prices will be hit in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Carbon credits, introduced by the EU to combat pollution by companies in the bloc, rallied last month to a 10-year high of nearly €30 a tonne after European policymakers moved to tighten supplies to boost a broad environmental push. But since Boris Johnson became UK prime minister, the price of one credit has slid to €26.