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As the world gets ready to begin the second decade of the twenty-first century, global climate change has been recognized as a real threat to civilization as we know it. The rapid and successful economic growth of developing nations, particularly China and India, is contributing to climate change. The route to initial economic success in China followed that of the developed nations through the development of industries. Unfortunately, China''s environmental protection efforts have not been the same as in developed countries because China is vastly different culturally, socially, economically and, especially, politically from developed nations. When China started to deal with environmental concerns in the late 1970s, it took advantage of the experiences of other countries in establishing environmental standards and regulations, but it did not have a model to follow when it came to implementing these standards and regulations because of the abovementioned differences. Economically, China is transitioning from an agricultural base into an industrial base; however, even now, 60% of the population remains farmers. China has been and still is heavily dependent upon coal for energy, resulting in serious atmospheric particulate pollution. While growing efforts have been expended on the environment, at this juncture of its economic development, China would be well served to revisit the traditional “develop first and clean up later” approach and to find a balance between development and protecting the environment. Against this backdrop, a reflective look of the effort to manage air quality from 1949–2008 (with an emphasis on the past 30years) in China is presented in this paper. The environmental component of the 2008 Olympic Games is examined as a special example to illustrate the current measures being used to improve air quality in China. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

An extraction method for deep-seated thick seam deposits by underground mining with high resource recovery has remained a great challenge for Indian mining engineers, whereas the longwall top coal caving (LTCC) method has evolved as an effective method for various geo mining conditions in China and other counties. The percentage of top coal recovery (TCR) plays a predominant role in determining the feasibility of LTCC, which relies on the First Top Coal Caving Distance (FTCD). In this paper, the critical geotechnical parameters are identified, numerically simulated, and statistically analyzed, and the FTCD for Indian geo-mining conditions is developed and validated. A financial assessment is conducted, considering 70% top coal recovery at 85% performance level, cost of production escalated by 20% and fall in coal grade by two grades. The internal rate of return (IRR) for LTCC is 30.24% as per the sensitivity analysis where it is only 18% in single pass longwall method. This study contributes to evaluating both the technical and economic feasibility of introducing LTCC in Indian geo-mining conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]