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| Volume 3, issue #1 - 07-01-1998 | |
Nov. 21, 1997 In the 21st century, Asia and the world will face a cruel dilemma -- how can big Asian countries banish poverty without wrecking the planet?
At the heart of the picture are China and India. Between them they already have more than 2 billion people, who aspire to the good things of life from refrigerators to cars.
But the developed nations are now keenly aware of the world-wide consequences of something as simple as using a fridge -- its emissions can harm Earth's protective ozone layer and increase the risk of cancer.
Further large-scale industrialisation in the world could threaten the Earth's overall atmosphere, unless the rich step in with state-of-the-art technology.
"This leaves a mighty conundrum for China and India, and for the rest of the world," wrote British historian Paul Kennedy. Technology transfer appears the logical solution, but it will need time, money and political will to achieve.
After their economic boom of the last few decades, Asian economies are now
major polluters -- China is the second biggest in the world. Since 1995 it has emerged as the largest producer of ozone-depleting chemicals, after the West phased out their use.
China's government has signed up for the environmental goals of sustainable growth agreed at the Rio Summit of 1992, but its booming economy is hard to control. Since 1980, China's gross domestic product has quadrupled, at heavy environmental cost.
Antiquated technology and a heavy dependence on coal -- one in every three tons of coal consumed world-wide is burned in China -- have sullied the skies and condemned hundreds of thousands of Chinese to an early death.
"An estimated 178,000 people in major cities suffer premature deaths each year because of pollution," according to a World Bank survey on China's environmental goals for 2020 entitled "Clear water, blue skies."
In much of Asia, the goal of clear water and blue skies looks a long way off. Indeed water of any kind is getting scarcer as the needs of growing
communities take their toll.
"So many of the big rivers are beginning to dry up," said Faizal Parish of environmental group Wetlands International in Kuala Lumpur. "The Yellow River did not reach the sea this year in the summer period. Nor has the Indus been reaching the sea in recent years."
"China faces enormous challenges in resolving chronic water shortages in the north and controlling widespread water pollution," said the World Bank survey. It said the Yellow River had been drying up for as long as 130 days of the year, for as much as 600 km (360 miles) of the lower-reach sections.
Some of Asia's cities are sinking as the water table drops. Environmentalists say that in the Thai capital, Bangkok, the water table has fallen some 25 metres (80 feet) since the 1950s, causing land to subside at a rate of 13 cm (five inches) a year.
Asian wetlands of all sorts are suffering, from the peat swamp forests of Indonesia going up in smoke to the mangrove swamps of the Philippines, which have lost 70% of their area in the last half-century largely because of fish farming.
Faizal said the rate of destruction of Southeast Asia's mangrove swamps, crucially important in protecting shorelines from erosion, had slowed for commercial reasons -- a collapse in the price of prawns.
China is already the second biggest commercial energy user after the United States. Without significant changes in policy -- what the World Bank calls a "business as usual scenario" -- China's contribution to emissions of the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming would soar. "Carbon dioxide emissions under the business as usual scenario will produce 2,380 million tons of carbon in 2020, nearly 3 times the 800 million tons in 1995" says the World Bank report. "Clearly, the international community should have a strong interest in helping China achieve its energy efficiency and diversification objectives."
Chinese researchers are grappling with all the implications of increased emissions of greenhouse gases and do not
like what they see. They predict that higher greenhouse gas concentrations will lower rice, wheat and cotton production because of higher temperatures, increased soil evaporation and more severe storms.
According to Chinese studies, a 1-metre rise in sea level would displace 67 million people, including the cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou. Most of the effects of global warming are expected to come after 2020, but Chinese policies in the next two decades or so will be closely watched.
One critical area will be transport. Will the Chinese have a love affair with the car like so much of the human race? Cycling and walking were the main form of transportation in China as late as 1992, the year of the most recent survey of urban travel.
China's motor vehicle fleet grew from 3 million in 1985 to more than 10 million by the end of 1994.
The numbers are modest, but Beijing's primitive vehicles create as much pollution as the motor fleets of Los Angeles or Tokyo, which are 10 times the size of
Beijing's.
The potential for growth in Chinese car ownership is enormous. The World Bank survey calculates that if Chinese incomes continue to rise and public transport worsens, then urban automobile ownership could rise to 85-130 vehicles per 1,000 people by 2010 and possibly twice this range by 2020.
If China's population remained at present levels, that would mean about 240 million vehicles in the year 2020. Not surprisingly, the World Bank and others are urging China to avoid this scenario and build up its public transport.
The World Bank survey estimated that air and water pollution in China cost $ 54 billion a year, about 8 % of GDP, in damage to human health and lost agricultural productivity.
Many analysts believe that the sheer cost of pollution, rather than any high-flown idealism, should eventually drive Asia along a more benign path. "I think the pressures will be dollars and cents. They will not be 'saving the earth' in Asia," said Lean Kang Loh, managing director of EnvironmentalResources Management in Singapore.
Some discern a hunger for greater democracy in Asia and see this as going hand in hand with growing environmental consciousness.
A leading ecology campaigner in Malaysia, Gurmit Singh, noted that in eastern Europe before the fall of communism environmentalists played a leading role in pro-democracy movements.
"The link between environmentalism and democratisation is happening in Asia in its own way," he said. "In South Korea the environmental movement is now much stronger than it was in the days of authoritarian governments."
Many Asians say the continent will find its own solutions and they counsel Westerners not to force their vision on the region. "The danger is that the Western world, with their money and all their 'green' thoughts, will try to impose their view on Asia. That would cause Asia to react badly," said Loh.
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