Environmental debts

WITH THE WORLD'S POPULATIONS EXPECTED TO reach seven billion next month, sustainable development has become an ever more urgent issue, one that is intertwined with the challenges of water scarcity, energy shortages, global health issues, food security and so on.

Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Rio Declaration, which laid out principles to guide sustainable development around the world. Two decades on, however, the planet is facing growing challenges posed by climate change, environmental degradation and the exploding population.

The situation in fast-growing China allows little optimism. In the past months, the Chinese media have been reporting some of the downsides of the country's rapid industrialization: how people's livelihoods, and even lives, are threatened by oil spills, chromium slag and the pollution generated in producing the wildly popular Apple gadgets, to name just a few.