ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY LEIGH WELLS

Visions of Green
	After decades of rapid economic growth, Asia's environment is at a tipping point. A Special Report on the scale of the crisis—and how to confront it
	By Bryan Walsh

Posted Monday, October 2, 2006; 20:00 HKT
If you want a sense of the challenges facing Asia's physical environment, just go to Beijing—and breathe. The Chinese capital's constant swirl of production, construction and transportation creates a noxious smog that blankets the city on bad days, cutting both visibility and life expectancy. At the junior world track-and-field championships in Beijing this August, young runners choked and sputtered their way to lackluster performances, a bad omen for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Asia has a history of holding an Olympics in a city with foul air. Tokyo, site of the 1964 Summer Games, was so polluted in the '60s and early '70s that citizens walked the streets in surgical masks, while Japanese cities like Minamata, where thousands were stricken with severe neurological damage due to industrial mercury poisoning, became bywords for ecological catastrophe. Fast-industrializing Japan was commonly expected to become an environmental dystopia. But today, Tokyo is one of the world's cleanest megacities, with the view often clear all the way to Mount Fuji. Stricter laws, tougher enforcement and a hard-earned environmental consciousness have made Japan a nation whose record is something to which other Asians can aspire, rather than a misery to be deplored.

Asia is at a crossroads. The question facing the region today is whether the forces that allowed Tokyo to clean itself up can kick in quickly enough in Beijing, or Bombay, or Jakarta, or a thousand other places where environmental damage threatens the quality of life for this generation—and the next. We can't wait long for the answer. By any measure, the state of Asia's environment is depressing. In the Philippines, a mountain of trash looms outside the capital. In Vietnam, the fertile Mekong River is imperiled by upstream damming. In Chongqing, the worst drought in a century is draining what little drinkable water is left. In Nepal, melting alpine glaciers are threatening to release devastating floods on the land below. In India, the Bengal tiger is nearing extinction, and it might just be joined one day by the foreign executive in Hong Kong, where pollution is driving expatriates to flee to greener cities. As for Bangladesh, you could churn whole forests listing its environmental troubles, but it might not matter—if global warming causes sea levels to rise just 1 m over the coming decades, 17% of the country will be underwater anyway.

Bringing this litany of disaster to an end will not be easy. For here is Asia's dilemma: the forces damaging the environment are the same ones that drove the economic miracle that has lifted more than 270 million Asians out of poverty in the past 15 years. Economic growth means more production, more jobs, more food on the table, but it also means more smokestacks, more logging, more chemicals dumped into the water. Asia, however, is running out of room to grow. A 2005 United Nations report warned that although one-fifth of Asians still exist on less than $1 a day, "the region is already living beyond its environmental carrying capacity." In August, Zhou Shengxian, director of China's State Environmental Protection Administration, said: "It is clear the conflict between economic growth and environmental protection is coming to a head."

Economic growth has been responsible for much of Asia's environmental disaster—but it can also spur its recovery. For as a nation such as South Korea shows, growth can give rise to environmentalism, as richer citizens demand that government and industry clean up. But Asia can't wait for the invisible hand to grow a green thumb; its problems are too intractable for that. Asia's future has to become one of sustainable "green growth," which protects and repairs the environment without hindering the economic development that remains a matter of life and death for too many. Improved environmental technology can help developing Asia become as efficient in cleaning up pollution as it is in creating it, but only if the commitment is made before we pass the point of no return. "I feel that every day is a race," says Barbara Finamore, director of the China Clean Energy Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a U.S. NGO. "It's a race to the death."

Ask five Asian experts to identify the region's most pressing environmental problems, and you'll get five different answers. Alex Wang of the NRDC says it's air and water pollution. For Elsie Cezar of the Philippines' Environmental Management Bureau, it's waste disposal and deforestation. World Wildlife Fund Cambodia's Teak Seng tags the illegal wildlife trade. All those problems have something in common: what makes them worse is what's making Asia richer. Take deforestation in Indonesia, which loses almost 2 million hectares of woodland a year. As China's economy has surged, so has its demand for timber—the country is now the destination for half of all tropical trees logged globally. In April, Indonesia announced that China had placed a $1 billion order for more than 700,000 cu m of a special hardwood tree to be used in constructing facilities for the Olympics. That lumber, at least, will be legal—a recent report by Greenpeace named China's booming furniture industry as the engine of worldwide illegal logging, although the developed countries that eagerly buy China's low-cost chairs and tables share the blame. At the current rate, Indonesia's lowland rainforests, home to the most diverse collection of trees on earth, could vanish forever by 2010.

Continued...

	Learning to Fly Green [Sep. 25, 2006] Air travel can be an environmentally dirty business. A couple tips on making it cleaner Dangerous Dive [Jul. 10, 2006] The perils and politics of swimming in China's Pearl River Still Losing a Harbor [Jun. 19, 2006] Hong Kong has a rare opportunity to fix its unwelcoming waterfront. Think it will take it? China's Toxic Shock [Nov. 27, 2005] A huge chemical spill shuts down a city's water--and another clumsy official cover-up is exposed The Middle Landfill [Nov. 17, 2003] China's economy vs. its environment More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine