Asias Clean Revolution

Owen Cylke and Somporn Kamolsiripichaiporn

The worlds economic future will be determined in significant part by what happens in rapidly industrialising countries-particularly in Asia-where capital, consumption, manufacturing and technology will again become a growth engine for the global economy. Significantly, the worlds environmental future is equally dependent on what happens in Asia where economic, population and urban growth and environmental stress are converging most forcefully.

Recognising that resolution of the tension between growth and the environment early in the third millennium may be the test by which posterity will most stringently grade our generation, the US-Asia Environmental Partnership organised a set of international conversations in 1998 to develop a better understanding of the Asian context and the rapidly changing global circumstance. Based on those conversations, and in close collaboration with the Greening ofIndustry Network, the Partnership felt confident in 1999 to step back from its project and programme work to look at frameworks for policy intervention, commissioning a series of papers both by Asian and by American authors. This book is the product.

In considering the issues and rather remarkable ideas put forward in the various chapters of this book, it may be useful to step back from the Asia Crisis to recall that from 1965-90 the 23 countries of East Asia grew faster than all other regions of the world. These same countries were also unusually successful at sharing the fruits of growth. As a result of rapid, shared growth, living standards improved dramatically over a 30-year period. Indeed, there is good reason for the period to have been characterised as an economic miracle. Asia will probably return to this kind of growth regime, maybe not to 8%-10% growth, but more likely 7%-8% than 4%-5%.

All the economies in Asia today are urban-organised and industrial-led. Indeed, the major development forces at work in the region will only accentuate these trends over the next 20 years. Think about it. Some 80% of the industrial infrastructure in just 20 years will consist of plant that is not on the ground today. Where 50% of global manufacturing already takes place outside the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) economies, perhaps as much as 75% will take place in the industrialising economies of Asia and Latin America by 2020.

Indeed, Asia may account for as much as 60% of world income by 2020. Perhaps 400 million will be added to the regions population over the next 20 years, and maybe 200 million will move into the consuming dass and into cities. It is the momentum of these forces, not just the numbers, that suggests that the worlds environmental future will be determined in significant part by what happens in Asia and in other rapidly industrialising and urbanising regions. The subject of this book, then, is truly important.

Context and perspective is particularly important, and here the book is especially useful. The DECO economies are not developing economies, and North America is not Asia. The drivers of a deaner environment may emerge from different sources than they did in the DECO, from concerns about scarcity in addition to public health, suggesting a policy priority for efficiency over pollution. The chapters in this book are filled with this kind of insight, arising as they do from intercontinental co-authorship. Similarly, this book calls our attention to the reality that today is not tomorrow, and that now is not then. Simple, perhaps, but recall that Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962 and that the Brundtland Report was issued in 1987 (WCED 1987). The Greening of Industry Network was launched in Asia in 1998, and the authors of the chapters in this book are debuting their work just today-at the dawn of a new millennium.

Against this backdrop, Asias Clean Revolution makes a most profound point-that reconciling economic and environmental goals will be possible only through a transformation in technology and industrial organisation-a shift unprecedented in scope and pace, to new technologies and systems that will dramatically reduce environmental impact per unit of prosperity. In other words, nothing short of a dean revolution will do. The book also succeeds in laying out the contours of the challenge and the full range of policy approaches necessary to reconcile economic and environmental goals. Quite possibly, political leaders in Asia will face no greater challenge in the decades ahead-a challenge that will require continuing effort at the highest levels of governance, and induding international co-operation on a scale seldom seen. The chapters in this book suggest a template for the required effort.

The opportunity for transformation, of course, does not present itself everywhere with equal promise. The DECO economies operate a largely ageing industrial infrastructure that depends on control, retrofit and remediation strategies to deal with pollution. Asia, on the other hand, appears to have most of the ingredients for a dean revolution: increasing public awareness and concern for the environment, improving environmental regulation and enforcement, rapid industrial growth (from a limited base), and increasing pressure for a deaner environment from the community on the one hand and from the international marketplace on the other.

The book also identifies the new forces that will drive development and sustainability in the 21st century. Globalisation is obviously one of them. It is linking economies and cultures and empowering individuals and groups as never before. It is opening immense new opportunities, and at the same time generating a potent backlash. And this combination of forces is compelling more and more governments and companies to recognise that sustainable development, industrial transformation, a deaner environment, increased corporate responsibility, greater citizen participation and concern for those left out of the growth phenomenon must move from a choice to an imperative. Certainly, there is no one code, no one set of guidelines, no one size that fits all; but this book reflects the growing recognition that there are principles to shape and work by, best practices to consider and adopt and new partners with whom to co-operate and innovate.

Asias Clean Revolution presents a template for the desired transformation. The core ideas are sound, illustratively:

1. Understanding the environmental challenge in Asia to include energy, water, materials and waste in addition to pollution