Resource management in Asia

Population growth, economic development, rising consumption, and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources have exerted severe stress on the environments of most Asian nations. The region faces the challenge of moving toward environmentally sustainable growth while reversing major environmental damage, including deforestation, habitat destruction, and air, water, and soil pollution.

Great progress in reducing poverty through economic growth has come at the expense of the environment in many Asian countries, particularly from the 1970’s onward. Whereas 60 percent of all Asians lived in poverty in 1970, that number was almost halved, to 33 percent, by 2000. However, by 2005 about 670 million Asians still lived on less than the equivalent of one U.S. dollar per day (adjusted for purchasing-power effects), a situation that led to the undernourishment of more than 500 million people out of a total Asian population that reached just over 4 billion in 2010. The continent was subject to ongoing pressures on the environment owing particularly to unsustainable economic growth that depleted and degraded many natural resources.

Intensive Agricultural Development

In Asia, the twin pressures of population growth and poverty reduction have often led to severe environmental degradation. A negative process often begins with land conversion, when forests, wetlands, and other natural habitats are cleared for agricultural and industrial use or for human settlement. As Asia became home to about 60 percent of the world’s human population by 2010 but encompassed only 30 percent of the earth’s land, some of which, such as the Gobi Desert, is inhospitable to human population, the pressures on arable and potentially arable land increased. By 2005, Asian arable land per capita was only 80 percent of the global average.

Primarily through deforestation, cropland in Asia (excluding the Middle East and Asian Russia) increased from 210 million hectares (520 million acres) in 1900 to 453 million hectares (1.12 billion acres) by 1994. From the 1970’s onward, high-yield strains of staple crops such as rice and wheat were planted and supported with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. In addition, Asian countries such as the People’s Republic of China, India, and the nations of Southeast Asia developed 90 percent of the world’s aquaculture, focusing on fish, shrimp, and shellfish. Unsustainably intense agriculture—involving irrigation of as much as 30 percent of the cropland in Asia and heavy use of agrochemicals—eroded soils and depleted and contaminated freshwater sources, threatening freshwater ecosystems and fisheries.

By the early twenty-first century, Asian nations were managing to extract more and more food from their land and coastal areas, both for domestic consumption and for interregional and intercontinental export. However, water pollution, soil erosion, and nutrient depletion led to general land degradation and loss of arable land. It was predicted that if unsustainable levels of agricultural use and development were not halted, the continent would eventually face a food crisis. Some observers advocated the use of genetically modified foods, which would lessen reliance on unsupportable levels of agrochemicals, but this alternative remained controversial. Promising developments, however, included the introduction of new, less environmentally destructive approaches to farming, such as conservation tillage practices and agroecology.

Economic Development

Whereas Japan began its industrialization with the Meiji Restoration after 1868, and beginnings of Chinese industry were seen at the end of the nineteenth century, most Asian nations did not begin to see full industrialization and above-world-average economic growth until the 1960’s and 1970’s. In 2004, Asia led all other global regions in economic growth. From 1995 to 2002, manufacturing in developing Asian nations grew by 40 percent. This rapid industrialization demanded land and energy and led to rapidly increasing emissions of pollutants into air, water, and ground. High levels of air pollution caused respiratory illnesses and acid rain that damaged lakes and forests; degraded soil, rivers, and aquifers; and harmed coastal ecosystems.

Initially, many developing Asian countries placed very little emphasis on technical means of pollution control and enforcement of antipollution laws. Power plants and factories were allowed to discharge their emissions into air and water, sometimes without even the most basic treatment. To fuel its industry and provide power and heat to its people, Asia used coal abundantly; by 2003, coal accounted for 41 percent of the energy consumed in Asia, particularly in China, India, and the Republic of Korea (South Korea). Another 39 percent of the energy came from oil, most of which came from the Middle East. Burning this amount of fossil fuel, often with at most rudimentary pollution-control devices in place and operational in many Asian countries, led to severe air pollution and contributed to greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming. Experts project that one result of global warming could be a rise in sea levels that would submerge island nations of South Asia and the Pacific and inundate heavily populated Asian coastal regions.

Air pollution became especially severe in Asian cities in China and India and in large urban agglomerations such as Bangkok, Thailand, and Hanoi, Vietnam. By 2006, the world’s ten most polluted cities were all Chinese. From the late 1990’s onward, China made fighting air pollution a national priority, and significant progress was achieved. Air pollution actually decreased as the economy grew, even though actual levels of reduction (for example, a 0.6 percent reduction of sulfur dioxide emissions in 2007) were still small. Emphasis was placed on increasing China’s notoriously inefficient generation and use of energy; the nation’s stated goal was to increase energy efficiency by 30 percent from 2006 to 2010. However, China’s project devoted to calculating the true economic cost caused by environmental pollution and degradation (its “green gross domestic product”) was stopped in 2007 when its negative figures exceeded even worst-case scenarios.

Very ambitious Asian projects to increase the share of cleaner hydroelectric power through construction of massive dams, such as the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, remained controversial. These megaprojects came with significant environmental problems of their own, including the destruction of river ecosystems, riverbank erosion, and resettlement of human populations on the scale of millions. Critics argued that better alternatives would be a series of smaller dams and increased energy efficiency. Another controversial approach to the reduction of pollution, undertaken in China and India, was the washing of coal to decrease its sulfur content; those opposing this practice noted that it depletes water resources. These cases show that no easy or quick solutions are available for the environmental problems caused by economic growth in Asia; the problems require a more holistic approach aimed toward sustainable economic development instead of rapacious resource depletion and environmental degradation.

Urbanization and Consumerism

In 2010 about half of Asia’s people, approximately 2 billion persons, still lived in rural areas and drew their livelihoods from farming, fishing, or forestry. In South Asia, 73 percent of all land was used for agriculture. As Asian economies had developed throughout the region, however, urbanization had increased tremendously. From 1970 to 2000, 560 million people moved from the countryside into Asian cities, increasing urban populations by 260 percent. Urbanization continued to rise in the twenty-first century, with average Asian city growth rates of more than 3 percent annually.

The rapid growth of Asian cities severely taxed the environment. Poor land management led to habitat destruction that threatened many kinds of animals, from elephants to birds. Urban sprawl initiated the conversion of forests, wetlands, and agricultural land. The growing numbers of people in cities caused groundwater depletion and shortages of potable water. Municipal solid and liquid wastes polluted water supplies, and wasteincineration polluted the air. Increases in motor vehicle use caused traffic congestion and air pollution. Growing suburbs required more roads as the residents depended on private vehicles in the absence of efficient public transport systems. Poor planning and ineffective law enforcement led to the rapid growth of crowded slum areas, where poor infrastructure failed to meet the needs of inhabitants, leading them to add to environmental degradation with untreated waste disposal that resulted in threats to public health.

Significantly rising living standards for many people in most Asian countries led to greater consumerism, which also affected the environment negatively, as the consumption of energy and natural resources increased along with waste production. All this taxed an environment strained already by intensive agriculture, new industry and manufacturing, and power generation. Many Asian nations were unable or unwilling to devote significant financial resources to addressing environmental degradation seriously and effectively when they were faced with the costs of serving increasing numbers of people desiring better living standards. It was not until the quality of daily life began to deteriorate visibly in Asian cities because of environmental degradation, and health and life expectancies of people began to decline owing to pollution-related illnesses, that previously neglectful governments began to take environmental issues seriously.

Environmental Challenges and Opportunities

Asia enjoys tremendous biodiversity, but the pressures of population growth and economic development obliterated, degraded, or fragmented significant areas of natural land that had served as habitat for wild animals and plants. Asia’s biodiversity became severely threatened as natural areas from lowland forests to grasslands and coastal estuaries, with their rivers and bays, were destroyed or degraded as the result of unregulated urban sprawl, legal and illegal logging, and land clearance for agricultural, industrial, or settlement use, with generally little regard for wildlife, plant life, and ecosystems. In addition, many species of animals were exploited legally and illegally for capture and sale to the pet trade or for use as food or in traditional medicines.

By 2010, approximately 7,500 Asian animal and plant species were considered to be threatened, half of them in Southeast and South Asia. About one-third of Southeast Asia’s rain forests were fragmented, and two-thirds of Asia’s wildlife habitat had been destroyed. Legal and illegal burning of forests in Indonesia had not only destroyed much wildlife habitat but also, together with industrial pollution, caused the annual emergence, beginning in 2001, of a huge brown cloud of polluted haze over South, Southeast, and East Asia. The severity of this problem led to the founding of theReducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) initiative, a program sponsored by the United Nations. It was begun in September, 2008, and was reaffirmed in the Copenhagen Accord of December 18, 2009. The goal of REDD is to reward emissions reductions through financial incentives for regional governments and people.

Conservationists, scientists, and environmental activists all agree that Asia’s poor overall record on nature preservation must be tackled with bold and effective conservation mechanisms, with a major shift toward environmental sustainability. Efforts have been made to place wildlife sanctuaries, nature reserves, and other open spaces under effective protection from development, with wildlife protected from poaching. The Asian tiger is just one of the species that has suffered greatly from habitat destruction and poaching; its numbers declined from about one hundred thousand in 1900 to a mere five thousand in 2000. One Asian success story has been China’s protection of the giant panda in well-monitored preserves; any person caught poaching pandas is subject to a sentence of life in prison.

Asia enjoys biologically rich oceans and coastal regions. Most of these are threatened by unsustainable fishing practices and by high levels of pollution caused by extraordinary population growth and rampant urban, agricultural, and industrial development. The region’s coralreefs are in particular danger; 88 percent of these reefs were considered at risk in 2010. The destruction of mangrove forests, more than 50 percent of which were gone by 2000, magnified human losses caused by the tsunami of December, 2004, which killed the most people where protective mangrove forests had been decimated.

The solutions to Asia’s significant environmental problems cannot be imposed from the outside; they must come from within the Asian nations. If Asian leaders and policy makers begin to emphasize environmental sustainability as their nations pursue economic development, and if laws protecting the environment are put in place and enforced, the degradation of Asia’s environment can be halted and slowly reversed. Such a major turnaround occurred in Japan during the 1970’s, after a series of highly publicized human-made environmental disasters, including the mercury poisoning of Minamata Bay, led to a dramatic increase in environmental protection laws and their effective enforcement.

Bibliography

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Jha, Raghbendra. “Alleviating Environmental Degradation in the Asia Pacific Region: International Co-operation and the Role of Issue Linkage.” In Regional Integration in the Asia Pacific, edited by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Paris: OECD, 2005.

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