East Asia spans countries including China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. This archive gathers reported milestones from the region — covering public health, environmental efforts, technology, and social progress. Each entry highlights specific, verifiable developments worth knowing about.
In 2019, the levels of anthropogenic SO2 emissions fell worldwide by 6%. In only the second time ever, SO2 emissions fell in all three of the countries most responsible for emitting it: China, India, and Russia.
Camera footage installed by Bing Xie, a Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen and her fellow research colleagues showed an increase of 25 percent in northern China’s Loess Plateau’s leopard population from 88 in 2016 to 110 in 2017.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced that Japan will become country carbon neutral by 2050, Bloomberg reported. As the world’s third-largest economy, this will require a “fundamental shift” away from coal, The Washington Post reported.
Their opening was an official part of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics’ Programme, making it the first “Pride House” officially recognized by the International Olympics Committee.
Huanghe Hydropower Development has connected a 2.2 GW solar plant to the grid in the desert in China’s remote Qinghai province. The project is backed by 202.8 MW/MWh of storage.
Citing the Paris Agreement that he and former U.S. President Barack Obama helped forge in 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping said his country would raise its emissions reduction targets. “We aim to have CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060,” he said.
New research published by The Lancet and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the China National Key Research and Development Program has found that annual deaths from air pollution in China are now below 1990 levels, having peaked in 2013.
Seoul, South Korea, is taking a step toward vehicle electrification with a new plan to phase out diesel vehicles from its public fleets by 2025, including mass transit fleets.
Eligible individuals from Hong Kong currently can come to the U.K. for six months without a visa. With the rule change, they will have the right to live and work in the country for five years. After that, they will be allowed to apply for settled status and then again for citizenship.
The five-year, $61 billion initiative calls for zero-energy public facilities and is expected to create 660,000 new jobs and reducing GHG by 12 million tons.
