Greenpeace China projects a climate change message onto Yong Ding Gate: Beijing, March 23 2009

The latest monthly slideshow of Greenpeace activities around the world has just been published, and it's been a busy time. Lots of action around climate change, as you'd expect, with big events in the US and Brazil, and a symbolic projection onto the Yong Ding gate in Beijing, China. 

Government wonks have once again been druming up support for GM food, the latest tub-thumping courtesy of science minister Ian Pearson. He's been saying that if engineered crops can be demonstrated to alleviate hunger around the world, then the great British public will be only too happy to see them being cultivated in our green and pleasant land as well.

Those pesky biotech companies never give up. After recently spinning the line that GM crops can be used to safeguard food production from the ravages of climate change, their latest wheeze is to try and convince us that GM technology can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Indian farmers campaigning against GM rice near Lucknow earlier this week © Greenpeace

A couple of GM stories have popped up recently over on our international site, one of which requires your help.

A tad belated but I just couldn't let this one pass. Last week, these words emerged from France's environmental policymaking forum:

"From now on, every major public project, every public decision will be judged on its effect on climate, and on its carbon cost. Each public decision will be judged on how it affects bio-diversity. The onus won't be on ecological decisions to prove their merit, but on non-ecological projects to prove they can't be done any other way. Non-ecological decisions must be taken as a last resort. It's a total revolution in the way we govern our country."

With Blair's recent departure, recollections of 1997 in the media have been dominated by two things: his ascension to power and the Spice Girls. On the other side of the world in China, that same year was important for a couple of other reasons. Most famously, the lease ran out on a small but strategic piece of land called Hong Kong and the British Empire lost one of its last outposts as ownership return to the People's Republic of China.

But on that same piece of land, about the same time Chris Patten was bidding a teary farewell, something else significant happened (at least, we like to think it was) - Greenpeace China opened its doors. The importance of this particular office to the organisation can't be underestimated and, as this video shows, many of our campaigns can't help but take China's astonishing economic and social development into account. And with China now possibly the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, the next ten years are going to be even busier over there.