APEC rapid growth costs environmental demage: Critics
APEC rapid growth costs environmental demage: Critics
TORONTO (AFP): Stunning economic growth in many Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies has been achieved at the cost of severe environmental degradation, environmentalists warned here yesterday.
Rapid growth based on fostering trade and investment with developed countries, mainly the United States and Japan, has made East Asia the world's economic dynamo and raised the standard of living of millions of its people.
But critics point to a 1995 World Bank study cautioning that "if unchecked the pace of the environmental damage from pollution and over-extraction of renewable resources threatens to compromise the welfare gains from higher incomes."
In a study released at the APEC environment ministerial conference here, the California-based Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development deplored the lack of effective institutional mechanisms to coordinate APEC's "myriad environmental projects."
The projects cover energy and tourism, sustainable cities and clean production technologies, food security and marine conservation.
"Despite APEC's stated commitment to 'sustainable development', environmental and macro-economic policy tracks remain largely separate, both within individual APEC economies and in APEC as an institution," the authors of the study, Lyuba Zarsky and Jason Hunter, said.
The anti-APEC Action Network here meanwhile said APEC "means cheap wages, anti-union policies, easy access to natural resources and lax or non-existent labor, environmental and human rights standards."
Environmentalists say regional cooperation should focus on three main areas: air, atmospheric and water pollution, especially those related to energy production and use; resource degradation; and demographic shifts, food security and urbanization.
The energy issue is perhaps the most pressing for both developed and developing economies within APEC, which was founded in 1989.
Projected high rates of economic growth in East Asia over the next 20 to 50 years will fuel a sharp hike in energy demand, likely to be based on fossil fuels, including high-sulfur and/or carbon-emitting coal, the study by the Nautilus Institute said.
Energy-related air pollution, especially "acid rain" induced by sulfur emissions from power plants in northern China, is already among the most severe pollution problems in Northeast Asia, it added.
Sulfur dioxide emissions in Asia as a whole are projected to outstrip those in Europe and North America by the year 2000.
Rapid growth in coal-based energy as well as motorized urban transport are also blamed for large increases in greenhouse gas emissions in Asia, which as a whole will account for 30 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions at the end of the decade.
Problems of energy demand also affect developed APEC members such as the United States, Canada and Australia, which are among the world's highest per capita carbon emitters.
In addition to air and atmospheric pollution, APEC economies are also beset by high rates of resource degradation. East Asia is said to have the world's highest rate of deforestation and loss of original habitat. According to the Asian Development Bank, the region's timber reserves will be depleted in less than 40 years.
The marine environment and fisheries, both coastal and offshore, are also under severe stress in many APEC countries.
Compounding the problems are demographic factors, including population growth -- Asia's population is projected to rise from 3.4 billion in 1995 to 4.9 billion in 2025 --, rural-urban migration and urbanization.
By 2015, the APEC region will have 13 megacities of more than eight million people and 112 cities with 1.5 million and eight million people, officials said.
APEC members are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States.