US designers Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu have proposed transforming Manhattan‘s Central Park into a sunken landscape encircled by a below-grade megastructure with office, housing, retail and cultural space. Titled “New York Horizon,” the project won first place in the eVolo Skyscraper Competition, which invites architects and designers to conceive futuristic towers. The annual ideas contest began in 2006. Sun and Wu have proposed ...

The Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), member organisations of Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) and community-based groups from the Niger Delta have called on the Nigerian government to match talk with action in the implementation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Assessment on Ogoniland. At a recent meeting on the non-implementation of the UNEP assessment ...

Ako Amadi, Head of Community Conservation and Development Initiatives (CCDI), in a recent chat with Augustina Ogbonna-Armstrong, sheds some light on the relationship between deforestation and harmattan, a dry and dusty north-easterly trade wind which blows from the Sahara Desert over the West African subcontinent into the Gulf of Guinea between the end of November and the middle of March. ...

Relevant government agencies have been urged to adopt policies aimed at restoring the coastal marine ecosystem in order to check possible reduction in fishing yield caused by the effects of El Nino, a phenomenon that brings about changes in the atmospheric system. Associate Professor of Environmental Planning and HOD, Department of Geography, Nasarawa State University in Keffi, Dr Nasiru Idris, who made ...

The Nigerian Textile Manufacturers Association (NTMA) has expressed its support for ‎the environmental release and commercialisation of genetically modified Bt Cotton for Nigerian farmers. The GM cotton is said to be resistant to pests’ invasion. A position paper signed by the NTMA Acting Director-General, Hamma Kwajaffa, noted that while the Nigerian textile industry is a strategic non-oil sector and the largest ...

Under its 13th Five Year Plan, China will nearly triple solar capacity by 2020, adding 15 to 20 gigawatts of solar capacity each year for the next five years, according to Nur Bekri, director of the National Energy Administration. That will bring the country’s installed solar power to more than 140 gigawatts. To put that in context, world solar capacity topped 200 gigawatts last ...

China has ordered power transmission companies to provide grid connectivity for all renewable power generation sources and end a bottleneck that has left a large amount of clean power idle, the country’s energy regulator has said. The grid companies have been ordered to plug in all renewable power sources that comply with their technical standards, the National Energy Administration (NEA) ...

Nearly $1 trillion (£700 billion) is being invested in new coal-fired power plants worldwide despite the fact that the demand for electricity generated from coal has declined for two years in a row, shows a new report released this week. The report, by Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and CoalSwarm, warns that this problem of overbuilding is creating an “increasingly severe ...

Ghana’s savannah ecology zone is well endowed with a large expanse of land, which under normal circumstances should have better served the people. But the harsh environmental conditions including the dryness of some areas, threats of desertification, water scarcity, land degradation, soil erosion and climate change impacts, have hampered development in the area and entrenched poverty among majority of the ...

Papua New Guinea has emerged the first nation to submit its nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC secretariat has thus created a new page on its website to capture the NDCs, which are countries’ formal climate action plans under the Paris Climate Change Agreement. According to the UN body, NDCs set out ...