Record growth over the last year pushed the UK green goods and services market past the £122bn mark, according to new government figures that reveal the low carbon economy now employs almost one million people.

The sector grew 4.7 per cent against the 2009/10 figure of £116.8bn, providing an additional £5.4bn of economic activity as green industries continued to defy the sluggish progress made by the rest of the economy.

Mumbai has emerged as the second-most liveable city in the world, according to an Ericsson ConsumerLab survey. The liveability factor has been tied to connectivity. Stockholm topped the list.

India's business capital has in the survey outranked cities such as New York, London and Los Angeles.

The 30-minute online survey (with 1,500 participants per city) was carried out in Cairo, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Stockholm, Beijing, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Seoul, London, Los Angeles, New York and Hong Kong.

Hong Kong has long preferred to blame its smoggy skies on polluting factories just over the border in mainland China. But new analysis suggests that the blame for much of the city’s pollution rests squarely on Hong Kong’s shoulders.

It seems like Singapore’s billion-dollar green investments have paid off.

A new study says that the city-state is Asia’s most livable city, beating regional rivals like Hong Kong, which now has one of the worst levels of air pollution in the world.

Hong Kong has decided to come clean with data on a dangerous form of air pollution, a month and a half after Beijing, a city with smoggier skies and a murkier approach to statistics, did the same.

After years of withholding the data, Hong Kong’s environmental protection department on Thursday began publicly releasing hourly measurements of the tiny pollutants known as PM2.5 – so called because they are smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter – that health experts say are especially threatening because they penetrate deeply into the lungs.

EU officials said Sunday they will negotiate with international partners angry at what they see as a climate tax on airlines, but refused to change hotly disputed legislation despite fears in Germany.

"We have always been open to continuing discussions on the possibility of equivalent measures" outside Europe, Isaac Valero, spokesman for European Union climate action commissioner Connie Hedegaard, told AFP.

The European Union's plan to charge airlines for their greenhouse gas emissions would rise dramatically to cost Chinese airlines 18 billion yuan ($2.8 billion) a year by 2030, China's civil aviation head said on Monday.

China would continue to push the EU to axe the scheme, which has angered countries including the United States and India, but was not planning to take retaliatory measures, said Li Jiaxiang, chief of China's Civil Aviation Administration.

About 50,000 residents in a southern Chinese city had their water supplies disrupted after a fish farm discharged sewage into the local water source, state media said Sunday, in the country's latest pollution incident.

Authorities in Foshan city, an industrial part of export- dependent Guangdong province close to Hong Kong, discovered the problem Saturday and immediately stopped taking water from the stream, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

"Initial investigations showed the aquatic farm ... had discharged waste water into the stream," it said.