Environmental concerns span Asia-Pacific region
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Environment Writer
The word "sustainable," just a few years ago a mantra of environmental extremists, is now mainstream, as government leaders wrestle with actual environmental crises, not just threats of crises.
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
There are examples of solutions, but they are often expensive, sometimes slow, and they can face powerful political and economic forces that fight change.
Maurice Strong was one U.N. official at the mayor's conference yesterday.
At Mayor Jeremy Harris' second Mayor's Asia-Pacific Environmental Summit yesterday, one leader after another confessed to struggling to reverse environmental collapse.
Zhou Yupeng, vice mayor of Shanghai, said his city now spends 3.12 percent of its gross domestic product on its investment in environmental protection.
The Chinese city of Xi'an is promoting the planting of trees in the city, is requiring the use of natural gas as a fuel that pollutes less than others, and has engaged in purifying polluted water for drinking, said its former vice mayor, Zhang Fuchun, now deputy direction of the Xi'an People's Congress.
Even tiny communities like the island of Aitutaki in the Cook Islands have been affected by practices that now go by the term "unsustainable."
Aitutaki Mayor Tai Herman said his island has placed 15 percent of its vast lagoon into marine sanctuary status as a result of overfishing. Herman said it took years to convince the island's communities to accept the concept of sanctuaries.
Some 400 people are attending the summit, which concludes tomorrow. It is aimed at bringing together Asia-Pacific leaders to discuss environmental problems and to share solutions.
Harris, in his opening remarks to the gathering, said: "Few of us would have conceived that we'd be confronted with so many complex and enormous problems with truly global consequences."
Honolulu is not immune from such problems. Harris said damaged fisheries and the loss of open space to development are among the key local issues.
But Hawai'i is in far better shape than many of the other major cities of the Asian-Pacific region.
"Nine of 10 of the most polluted cities in the world are in China," said Maurice Strong, the first director of the United Nations Environmental Program and now special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Strong said the cities' problems are closely related to the problems the entire world faces with pollution and global warming, and the populous, fast-growing Asian cities are a key to the future.
"I believe that the fate of the Earth will be settled in the first two or three decades of this century, and what happens in Asia will be the primary determinant," he said.
Richer cities such as Hong Kong, Singapore and cities in Japan may have the resources to resolve some of their issues, but for ones such as Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, and Beijing, the issue is critical, Strong said.
In China's largest cities, smoke and dust from burning coal cause more than 50,000 premature deaths and more than 400,000 new cases of bronchitis. And 40 percent of the global mortality in young children caused by pneumonia occurs in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Indonesia, Harris said.
When world populations were lower, humans were able to consume resources without regard to sustainability, Harris said. But today, the threats of overconsumption are inescapable.
Pollution is now so bad that it sweeps across municipal and national boundaries, said Klaus Topfer, the former German minister of the environment who now heads the U.N. Environmental Programme.
The toxic clouds from the smokestacks of one city's factories blow into the streets of other cities, or across oceans into the air of distant nations. They also pump carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, increasing global climate change, he said.
Strong said that even the advanced nations such as the United States, itself a major producer of greenhouse gases, are suffering the consequences of climate change. Strong said insurance industry figures suggest that payouts for damage caused by natural disasters like floods and hurricanes are increasing dramatically.
One of the effects of warming predicted by climate models is more aberrant weather, he said.
The good news for cities and for the world is that there are solutions, Strong said.
"We not only know now what we've done to our environment. We know what to do about it. But we're not doing it. Why aren't we doing it? We lack the motivation," he said.
Ultimately, that means the people on the streets need to understand the issues and demand action toward sustainability, he said. In some cases, communities have already taken the first steps, such as the fishing preserve on Aitutaki, limits on the number of automobiles allowed in Singapore, the closing of the most polluting chemical plants in Shanghai and the opening of new plants with cleaner processes.
Said Harris: "We as the builders and managers of cities need to redesign our cities and their infrastructure, their neighborhoods and streets.
Around the world we still depend on notions of urban planning from 19th-century Europe or on water and sewage infrastructure design from Roman times."
