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Environmental cost of Asia's
development
By Alan Boyd
SYDNEY - Neglect of the environment is costing
Asian economies as much as 8 percent of national growth,
and the extent of degradation is accelerating, the Asian
Development Bank (ADB) has warned in its latest regional
assessment.
River systems contain four times as
much pollution as the global average, while lead
emissions are above safe proportions in most large
cities. Per capita forest cover is 65 percent below
world standards, and falling fast. "Environmental
degradation in the region is now pervasive, accelerating
and largely unabated," the bank stated, adding that
"resources that underpin long-term economic development
are at risk".
Often berated for its own
inconsistency over project evaluations that appear to
threaten natural resources, the ADB has spent two years
devising a new Environment Policy that acknowledges the
need to integrate environmental and economic objectives.
This focus reflects similar warnings by the World Bank
and other international lending agencies that Asia may
have to reassess its growth-first strategy, which
assumes that the environment can be cleaned up once
development aims have been achieved.
There is
also a growing acceptance that higher economic rates
alone cannot achieve the long-term goal of reducing
poverty levels: also needed are policies that can
preserve national resources for future generations.
Within the next 15-20 years, at least 50 percent
of Asians are expected to be drawn into huge urban
sprawls such as China's Pearl River Delta that also
contain some of the region's most important industrial
facilities.
Yet researchers at the University of
Hawaii and Singapore's Institute of Policy Studies have
found that production sectors are expanding at a rate
that far exceeds the capacity of many countries to cope
with environmental stress. As consumption feeds the
problem, economic growth is struggling to keep pace. By
the early 1990s, air pollution was already increasing at
two to three times economic growth in Indonesia,
Thailand and the Philippines because of higher
motor-vehicle ownership and expanding factories.
According to the Hawaii-Singapore study, energy
demand is doubling about every 10 years, with the result
that Asia will be producing more sulfur-dioxide
emissions than Europe and the US combined by 2005.
"Pollution levels associated with urban and industrial
growth in this region have been increasing faster than
even the high 6-10 percent per annum national economic
growth rates over the past few decades," noted the
study's authors, Mike Douglass and Ooi Giok Ling.
Environmental standards are deteriorating in
almost every sector of the community, with populous
China and India viewed as being most at risk. With the
possible exception of Singapore, few countries have
achieve any marked improvements in the past decade.
The ADB reported that the frequency of suspended
air particulates, the chief cause of respiratory
ailments, was generally twice the world average and more
than five times the norm for advanced countries. China
and South Asia suffer especially from particulates,
while Southeast Asia has the biggest problem with lead.
East Asia and some of China's eastern provinces are
battling sulfur-dioxide emissions.
Organic
pollution in rivers is 1.4 times the world average,
partly because of excessive levels of human waste, which
are three times as great as elsewhere and 50 times the
standards set by the World Health Organization.
Suspended solids are at their worst in China and human
wastes are most prevalent in India and Southeast Asia,
while South Asia has a particular problem with nitrates
from chemical-fertilizer runoffs.
Poor
sanitation, untreated urban sewerage and a failure to
treat wastewater before it is discharged into river
systems are among the leading causes of marine
pollution. "Overall, some 42 percent of lost
disability-adjusted life years in Asia are due to water
pollution and inadequate sanitation, making it the most
important among the major environment-related health
risks," the ADB report stated.
Although urban
authorities spend 50-70 percent of their revenues on
waste management, little more than half of factories
usually have access to disposal services for solid
industrial toxic waste, forcing others to use rivers,
landfills or open burning.
Government spending
on environmental protection amounts to less than 1
percent of gross domestic product (GDP), while the World
Bank calculates that neglect of the environment is
costing an average of 5 percent of GDP. China is
believed to be losing as much as 10 percent of its
national income to pollution and India 5-6 percent. The
direct cost of water and air pollution alone in India is
believed to be as high as US$10 billion annually.
Funding in East Asia was drastically slashed at
the onset of the 1997 financial crisis, and has never
recovered. South Korea cut its environmental budget from
2.8 percent of GDP in 1997 to just 0.3 percent a year
later, and there were similar cutbacks in Thailand and
Indonesia.
Japan, with an average annual outlay
of 1.8-2 percent of GDP, spends the most on
environmental protection, followed by South Korea with
1.3-1.6 percent, Singapore with 1.2-1.5 percent and
Taiwan with 1-1.2 percent of GDP. At the other end of
the scale, Vietnam spends only about 0.1-0.3 percent of
GDP, and China, Indonesia and the Philippines 0.5-0.7
percent. Malaysia and Thailand both invest almost 1
percent of GDP on the environment.
India's
expenditure is not fully documented because of the
fragmented structure of government, but is believed to
be less than 1 percent of GDP despite a markedly higher
priority accorded to the issue since 1992.
Perceptions are changing, but only as
governments balance the cleanup burden against their
soaring economic losses.
"Paradoxically, it is
... now well known that cleaning up the environment
might be cheaper than the current costs of pollution to
both industry and society," the Hawaii-Singapore study
noted, citing World Bank data. "An estimated full-cost
valuation of all pollution in large Asian cities is 5-10
percent of urban GDP, while the cost of cleanup is
estimated to be only about 2-3 percent of GDP."
The most neglected pollution sector is generally
assumed to be the land environment, which sustains the
biggest impact from inadequate waste disposal systems
and is often more difficult to monitor.
As with
all other segments of the environment, the chief
economic victims of polluted land are the poor, who
usually depend upon agriculture for their livelihoods or
subsist in crowded urban slums.
More than 130
million hectares of arable farmland has been lost to
salinization and waterlogging because of poor irrigation
and drainage practices, mostly in China, India and
Pakistan. Another 74 million hectares of land has been
transformed into desert in semi-arid areas of South
Asia. A prime cause of land deterioration is
deforestation, which is occurring at the rate of 1
percent a year, taking hundreds of species with it.
"Asia accounts for 40 percent of the world's
species of flora and fauna; but with few exceptions,
Asian countries have lost 70-90 percent of their
original wildlife habitats to agriculture,
infrastructure, deforestation and land degradation," the
ADB reported.
"Biodiversity loss may reduce the
resilience in ecosystems and place the poor who depend
on these ecological resources at risk of losing their
livelihoods."
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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