Feature Article

It’s official: nuclear power will have a much smaller role in Japan’s energy future than was once thought. Since the meltdowns and gas explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in March 2011, all of Japan’s remaining reactors have been shut down for inspections and maintenance.

Brazil’s vast forests lost some legal protections last week, but less than environmentalists had feared. On 28 May, President Dilma Rousseff vetoed a dozen sections of the revamped forest code passed a month earlier by the lower house of Brazil’s National Congress.

The world has a surfeit of pledges, commitments and treaties. What it needs from the second Earth summit in Rio is firm leadership and a viable plan for success.

As host nation of Rio+20, Brazil should choose the right course for its own development, say Fabio Scarano, André Guimarães and José Maria da Silva.

The US Commerce Department will begin imposing duties on wind tower imports from China, after finding that producers receive unfair government support. The move is expected to ratchet up tensions between the two trading partners, which have escalated quickly over the past few months over competing claims from both sides of illegal support and dumping of renewable energy products.

egotiators meeting in New York struggled to achieve demonstrable progress on narrowing down an outcome document to forward to this month's Rio+20 summit, sparking questions among observers about what to expect at the high-profile UN gathering.

Trade ministers from the 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) countries hope to have a list of environmental goods for tariff liberalisation by September, officials announced after meeting in Kazan, Russia earlier this week. The two-day gathering also saw ministers address issues such as food security and trade facilitation, while continuing discussions on liberalising trade in services and information technology products in the WTO context.

Climate change is a public health problem. Evidence from many sectors shows substantial health impacts of climate change, particularly for the most vulnerable: the poorest, the youngest, and the oldest.

Jerome Singh argues that health ethics principles must be afforded equal status to economics principles in climate change deliberations, and that the health community must play more of a leadership role.

Street-level concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM) exceed public health standards in many cities, causing increased mortality and morbidity. Concentrations can be reduced by controlling emissions, increasing dispersion, or increasing deposition rates, but little attention has been paid to the latter as a pollution control method. Both NO2 and PM are deposited onto surfaces at rates that vary according to the nature of the surface; deposition rates to vegetation are much higher than those to hard, built surfaces.