Tokyo Olympics prepare for heat effect

The Japanese are renowned for their organisation, so it's not really a surprise that with one year to go until the Olympic Games in Tokyo, preparations are well and truly on track.

Spray stations are part of the plan to limit the
effects of heat at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Venue construction is on track and ticket sales have exceeded expectations. But one of the key - albeit limited - problems facing these games is likely to be out of Japan's control - heat.

North Asia Correspondent Jake Sturmer reports from the host city.

Listen to the story from Radio National - “Tokyo Olympics prepare for heat effect.”

Drowning in garbage

Since early 2016, I have travelled to six major cities around the world (Jakarta, Tokyo, Lagos, New York, Sao Paulo and Amsterdam) to investigate how they manage — or mismanage — their waste. There are some remarkable differences. And a question emerges: Is this just garbage, or is it a resource?

Scavengers dig through the trash at Jakarta’s Bantar Gebang.

The world generates at least 3.5 million tons of solid waste a day, 10 times the amount a century ago, according to World Bank researchers. If nothing is done, that figure will grow to 11 million tons by the end of the century, the researchers estimate. On average, Americans throw away their own body weight in trash every month. In Japan, meanwhile, the typical person produces only two-thirds as much. It’s difficult to find comparable figures for the trash produced by mega-cities. But clearly, New York generates by far the most waste of the cities I visited: People in the broader metropolitan area throw away 33 million tons per year, according to a report by a global group of academics published in 2015 in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences. That’s 15 times the Lagos metropolitan area, their study found.

Read The Washington Post story by Kadir van Lohuizen - “Drowning in garbage.”

Early cherry blossoms blooms Japanese evidence of climate change

Tokyo: Cherry blossoms in Japan are opening and reaching full bloom at a hastened pace this year as a result of a warm spell.

Late March temperatures have surged 4.5 degrees higher than average, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

The blossoms, locally known as sakura, are already in full bloom in Tokyo, where temperatures exceeded 20 degrees this week, drawing hundreds of people to the capital's Imperial Palace park to observe the mature clusters of delicate pink flowers.

In parts of the north-eastern Tohoku region, where the season for cherry blossoms typically begins in early to mid-April, onlookers are surprised that the cherry trees have already started flowering.

Read the Melbourne Age story - “Cherry blossoms out early in warm Japan.”