I first met Ding Jie a decade ago when she was a college graduate taking on heavy polluters in the big city. Together we toured the city of Wuhu, located west of Shanghai on the Yangtze River in southern Anhui Province. Making our way through stagnant air and past construction rubble and urban decay, I … Read more
What a week. Between the world’s premier UN Climate Conference “COP26” and the global shipping crisis, Team Pacific Environment has been hard at work. What’s more, Indigenous partners just won a first-ever seat at the United Nations’ shipping body! Earlier this week, the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) became the first Indigenous Organization to gain International … Read more
WASHINGTON (October 19, 2021) — Global retail giants including Amazon and IKEA today announced a landmark commitment to move their products off of fossil-fueled maritime cargo ships by 2040, but environmental organizations with the Ship It Zero coalition say the commitment is too weak to address the urgent climate and public health crises tied to … Read more
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Sea-LNG, lobbyist for producers and users of liquefied natural gas, took aim at Maersk according to Shipping Watch. Sea-LNG wrongly argues that fossil LNG is necessary as a transition fuel as the shipping industry moves towards the green transition. The following is a statement by Madeline Rose, Pacific Environment’s Climate Campaign … Read more
Big Oil is racing to make more plastic as demand for fossil fuel energy is plummeting. Fossil fuels are the core element in the production of plastics. Faced with falling profits from dirty energy use, the industry is proposing massive expansion of the petrochemical production of plastics—drowning our communities and oceans in plastic trash. Our … Read more
Professor Nhan Nguyen brings his passion for reducing plastic waste into the classroom at RMIT University in Ho Chi Minh City. “Climate change and plastic pollution are the environmental issues of our time,” Nhan says. “Vietnam doesn’t contribute much to climate change, but we are a major contributor to plastic pollution. I want my students to know about these … Read more
While it may seem unusual for an environmental group to provide medical relief, for Zhang Jun, temporarily pivoting his organization to COVID-19 relief made sense. When the COVID-19 crisis hit China, he contacted the local government in Anhui Province (about 200 miles from the outbreak’s early epicenter in Wuhan) to offer his team’s help. Having … Read more
Did you know that more than 90% of plastic waste is never recycled? Instead, most of it is being sent to landfills and incinerators, or polluting our land and our oceans. Meet Mrs. Lan who is working on the frontlines of plastic pollution in Vietnam. Mrs. Lan picks through household trash to make her living … Read more
Pacific Environment’s staff and leadership express solidarity with protesters in the Bay Area and everywhere who have taken to the streets over the murder of George Floyd by a police officer who was supposed to protect people. Floyd’s murder, coupled with those of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, and Tony McDade, as well as the racist targeting of … Read more
UPDATE: If you missed the webinar, you can watch it now on our YouTube channel. Ships connect the world. The coronavirus crisis reminds us just how much. While millions are on lockdown and entire economies closed, the international shipping industry is working at full speed — moving the foods, goods, and medical supplies the world … Read more
Today, Pacific Environment and environmental allies urge the head of the UN’s Shipping Agency to proceed rapidly to decarbonize international shipping. Critical UN environmental meetings have been rightfully postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic — environmental groups support these actions, but the inability to convene in person must not be used as a pretext to … Read more
In February, our Arctic team returned to London to push for a ban on heavy fuel oil. Pacific Environment and Indigenous and international allies urged the United Nations to listen to science and respect the wishes of local communities to ban this dirtiest of all fossil fuels from the Arctic. The ban will directly protect … Read more
London, Friday February 21, 2020: NGOs and Indigenous groups today cautiously acknowledged progress by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and its Member States in agreeing on a draft regulation on heavy fuel oil (HFO) use and carriage in the Arctic, but denounced the inclusion of loopholes in the text that mean the ban will not come … Read more
Over 46,000 people want Carnival Corporation’s dirty cruise ships out of Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park. We made sure the National Park Service got that message. Two years ago, a Carnival-owned Holland America cruise ship illegally dumped 22,000 gallons of wastewater in Glacier Bay National Park. At the time, they were fined $250—a fraction of … Read more
London, January 27, 2020 – Responding to the discovery that some of the new blended low sulphur shipping fuels developed and marketed by oil companies to comply with IMO 2020 air pollution standards will actually lead to a surge in the emissions of a Super Pollutant known as Black Carbon, the Clean Arctic Alliance is … Read more
With the support of activists like you, we are building people power around the Pacific Rim to fight climate change, defend the oceans, promote open and inclusive societies, and ensure a just transition to a clean energy future for all. Here are five accomplishments I’m especially proud of this year. They would not have been … Read more
Earlier this year, Mellisa Maktuayaq Johnson told a room full of international shipping experts in London that “the sea and the land are our store.” Most people in the audience are used to shopping at supermarkets like Safeway or Costco, so it took a moment before they grasped the implications of what they were hearing. … Read more
Yu Jianfeng recently started fighting “white pollution,” as people in China call plastic pollution based on the ubiquity of discarded white plastic bags. “Plastic is a really big problem for rivers,” he said. “It is eaten by fish and other wildlife and its toxic chemicals can move up the food chain. It affects individual species, … Read more
When recently a pod of 100 dolphins swam through Cu Lao Cham Marine Protected Area (MPA) off the coast of Central Vietnam, it got residents and park officials talking. It had been a long time since people spotted marine mammals in the coastal waters. Development and fishing had driven them away. “Maybe a big typhoon … Read more
Earlier this month, I was in a rural area of China, up in a mountain village whose residents—mostly small-plot farmers and proprietors of small tourist hostels—had agreed to participate in a project to try to reduce the plastic waste of the village. The villagers quickly learned that almost all their waste was plastic waste from … Read more