I get quite a few emails giving me updates on companies CSR activities but this one just had to be shared.  I don't think it's a spoof given that it isn't April Fools Day but you never know.

The update reads as follows:  "The first news is regarding the Miss Big Pageant  2010, held by the Ministry of Forestry Indonesia, and sponsored by APP. (Get ready for the killer line) The Winner of this Pageant will become the ambassador of the Save the Rhino campaign, an effort to save the Javan Rhino".

Companies supporting beauty pageants - interesting - associating the 'big' women who win those pageants  with a rhino - very interesting. You can read more on this campaign here

Hugh MacLeod once said that the social media enabled people to have a smarter and faster conversation than most companies. I'm willing to bet that the Nestlé Kerfuffle is just what he had in mind.

Please take the time to watch the presentation (here at the brilliant Prezi). It shows the first four days of the online PR battle between Nestle and Greenpeace over rain forests, palm oil and Nestlé's Kit Kat.

The short version is that Greenpeace UK started a campaign that included posting a video on YouTube arguing that Nestlé buys palm oil from companies that destroy rainforests. Nestlé got YouTube to take down the video, and thus began Nestlé's descent into a PR battle that went belly-up from Day 1. Required viewing for anybody thinking of how to engage stakeholders (a kind of "how not to to it"). Well worth your time...

Sandstorms in China resulting from desertification due to overgrazing, deforestation, urban sprawl and drought have been choking Hong Kong over the past few days. Pollution readings have jumped sixfold to register readings of 500 (more than double the previous high reading in 2008 of 202) - or 15 times the World Health Organisation's recommended maximum limit. You can see more stories on the situation here.

On a related note, one of our employees in the Guangzhou office said to me this week that since moving there in November from Shenzhen she cannot recall seeing a blue sky. With summer fast approaching, the chances of blue skies are receding rapidly and her chances of seeing anything remotely resembling blue are pretty slender in the short term.

The photo above is by Tyrone Siu (for Reuters) and can be found here (with more images). To be honest, the view in that photo is not uncommon.

AAP is reporting that "Papua New Guinea landowners have won a David and Goliath battle to freeze a Chinese nickel miner's construction of a massive pipeline to dump waste into the sea. The national court in Madang on Friday ordered work to stop on the nickel mine's previously approved submarine tailings disposal system. The Ramu mine in Madang Province, on PNG's northwest coast, operated by the Chinese Metallurgical Construction Group Co (MCC), plans to dump five million tonnes of slurry waste annually into Basamuk Bay."

The Chinese Metallurgical Construction Group is part of the China Metallurgical Group Corporation, which is a state-owned enterprise engaging in EPC (engineering, procurement and construction), natural resources exploitation, papermaking, equipment fabrication, real estate development. Its subsidiary, China Metallurgical Corporation Limited, is listed on both the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

The company states on its website that it "has to date invested as much as US$1 billion in mining resources abroad, and owns many production facilities and claims of resources including iron ores, copper, gold, nickel, cobalt, zinc, lead and aluminum".

This is an interesting story in relation to my posting last week on Deborah Brautigam's book The Dragon's Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa, which suggests that we need to look behind the media hype that Chinese investment is destroying whole ecosystems.