The Knowledge to Decide

Global air pollution costs add up to more than USD160 billion in lost productivity every year, China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the cost to China of carbon emissions is estimated at USD7.6 billion. As China implements countermeasures to ensure clean air, what does that mean for its economy? Will there be a clean-tech silver lining? China’s air pollution chokes its economy More than 80 per cent of Chinese people face regular exposure to dangerous levels of air pollution, which is the cause of death for more than 4,000 people per day on average. The country’s economy grew by approximately 10 per cent year-on-year from 1980 to 2010, but the phenomenal pace of growth came at a big cost to the environment. China’s environmental crisis first became a discussion point during the 1970s with widespread concern over the black smoke emanating from its industrial cities. The primary causes of pollution are the burning of coal in factories and power plants

As dependence on big data and analytics grows, so does the risk of IT security breaches. The imperative for companies and governments to protect their IT systems has never been stronger. IT security today is a USD60 billion industry with the U.S. at its forefront. As the number of threats increases, will our existing IT security tools be enough to hold the line? The IT security industry is poised for growth. Its core product offerings continue to perform well: firewalls, anti-malware, authentication and encryption, plus 80 other product categories. Investors in the US are bullish about this sector. They ploughed USD3 billion into IT security companies between 2011 and 2013, eventually funding some 300 firms. The most recent instance of a wildly destructive IT threat was the Heartbleed bug, discovered in April 2014. It left 600,000 servers vulnerable. The Achilles heel it exploited was the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) – an encryption technology

With global warming gradually melting away polar ice caps, new opportunities are slowly, but surprisingly, emerging for trade, tourism and natural resource extraction in the Arctic Circle. But is developing such opportunities at odds with environmental sustainability? Arctic sea ice sank to yet another record annual low in September 2012, at 44% below the 1981-2010 average. The Arctic Ocean is projected to be almost ice-free by the end of this century; with the ice melting at an accelerating rate, quicker than predicted by any climate model. A decade ago, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” drew world attention to the moral consequences of global warming. These included the destruction of farming, the flooding of coastal land displacing millions of people and the spread of tropical diseases to new parts of the global population. Though the consequences of global warming on the Arctic are inherently detrimental, the shrinking icecaps herald new opportunities for trade, tour