Global Policy Forum

By Alan Boyd

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."

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