Visions of Green—Page 2

Indonesia is a poor nation that needs the billions China sends its way, just as China needs the funds its furniture factories bring in. "The mentality is still that development should be put in front of the environment," says Jayaradha Veerasamy of the Malaysian Nature Society. But the hidden costs of environmental degradation can be catastrophic—nowhere more so than in natural disasters that have become increasingly common in Asia. The impact of climate change on the frequency and intensity of storms is still uncertain; but there's no doubt about other facts that worsen natural disasters. Deforestation can make devastating landslides more common, just as the destruction of coral reefs and underwater mangrove forests stripped coastlines of a vital defense against the 2004 tsunami. Without better preparation of the sort Japan perfected against natural disasters, death tolls will only rise as urbanization packs formerly rural populations into areas more vulnerable to earthquakes, floods and storms.

But economic growth may also create a solution by turning environmentalism into a valued consumer good. Just as richer people want more cars, TVs and air conditioners—all of which lead to more pollution—they also want air that doesn't make their children asthmatic, and water that might even be drinkable out of a tap. Economists have a term for it: the environmental Kuznets Curve, which hypothesizes that once per-capita incomes reach a certain level—in some past examples, around $5,000—pollution levels begin to plunge, as they did in once-filthy cities like London and Los Angeles. "You have the phenomenon of people with higher incomes feeling inconvenienced by pollution and wanting the government to spend money to fix it," says Finamore. If it happened in Tokyo in the '70s, it can happen in Bombay some time in the next couple of decades.

Pessimists will say that even at their current torrid rates of growth, it will take decades before nations like China and India are rich enough to decide they want to be clean—and by then the damage may be irreversible. The good news is that today's Asians may not have to wait that long. Contemporary antipollution and energy-efficiency technology is far superior to that used in the West's first cleanups. If developing Asia commits soon to investing in environmentally friendly policies and technology—clean coal plants, efficient water pricing, natural gas-powered bus transit—the region could take a green leap forward. To be sure, that will require serious investment from those developing advanced technologies in the rich world, but the scale of Asia's environmental challenges is so immense that everyone has a stake in its success. The pump is already primed: in August the World Bank brokered the largest ever greenhouse-gas contract, which will see European and Asian organizations pay two Chinese chemical firms $1 billion to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 19 million tons a year. "There's a paradigm shift beginning to manifest itself in Asia's environmental policy," says Cornie Huizenga, who heads the Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities for the Asian Development Bank and World Bank. "You're starting to see investments shift as well."

Carbon credits alone will not buy a better environment for Asia. A revolution in awareness must be embraced by the individual, with inspirational Asians leading the way, like Tsering Dorje, the Tibetan activist fighting the illegal wildlife trade, or Vu Thi Quyen, who founded Vietnam's first homegrown environmental group. Those efforts can be multiplied by the growth of established environmental NGOs. India is blessed with some of the best organizations, like Sunita Narain's Centre for Science and the Environment, but even in China environmental groups are expanding in fits and starts. Politicians, too, must play their part, making sure that a commitment to a new sort of growth is taken seriously from the halls of government ministries right down to tiny villages.

Yale University's Center for Environmental Law and Policy recently ranked nations on environmental performance and found that good governance was even more important than income. That's one reason why highly regulated Singapore has proven far better at combating pollution than laissez-faire Hong Kong. It also means that China, which will really decide the future of Asia's environment, needs to match its bold national goals with local follow-through—something it has conspicuously struggled to do so far. "There's that old adage in China that the mountains are high and the emperor is far away," says Dan Dudek, chief economist for Environmental Defense. China's growth-obsessed, corner-cutting local governments cannot be allowed to drive the country's environmental policy.

Some days—when the air is heavy in Hong Kong and the gridlock is choking Jakarta—it seems to take optimism bordering on willful ignorance to feel positive about the future of Asia's environment. But other nations, including Asian ones, have faced down pollution and come clean. There are times, and places—everyone who lives in Asia has known them—when it seems it will take a miracle to save the region's environment. It wouldn't be Asia's first.

With reporting by Cat Sieh/Hong Kong

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