"So part of what is being done here is to tease out some of these problems so that city managers can deal with them one at a time, as opposed to what seems to be happening is that they are all coming at them at the same time."
Fixing Asia's environmental mess -- from stifling sandstorms and rapid soil erosion in China to treating sewage in Indian rivers and Southeast Asian air pollution -- is turning into a billion-dollar business.
US Department of Commerce is sending an "Environmental Technologies" trade mission to Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam next March to scout for opportunities for US companies, citing "significant" potential for US expansion.
It estimates that Malaysia's "environmental" market is worth around US$800 million, mostly for safe water supply and sewage treatment, and says Thailand needs to spend around US$1.2 to US$1.5 billion on clean water and sanitation by 2020.
In Vietnam, a pollution control equipment and services market was worth US$450 million this year alone, it said.
FESTERING ISSUES
Other environmental problems, however, are festering.
In Indonesia, home to the world's third-largest tropical forests after Brazil and the Congo, forests have disappeared at a rate three to four times faster than those in Brazil since 1990, mostly because of logging and burning, says international environmental group Global Forest Watch.
"Every year the country is losing nearly two million hectares of forest. If this rate continues, then by 2010 most forest in Sumatra and Kalimantan will disappear," said Longgena Ginting, who is the head of local environmental group Walhi, referring to two of Indonesia's biggest islands.
Much of this feeds huge demand for timber in economically booming China where logging was banned after excessive tree-felling contributed to floods that killed around 4,000 people in 1998.
Chee Yoke Ling of the Third World Network, a Malaysian lobby group, said countries such as Malaysia had nice-sounding environmental laws but fell down on implementation, as damage to tropical forests in Borneo's Sarawak and Sabah states continues.
"We have it but we don't enforce it," she said.
Chinese sandstorms are widely attributed to over-grazing, over-ploughing and over-use of water resources.
a framework for action
ASEAN's "Framework on Environmentally Sustainable Cities" uses some European cities as a model and is partly funded with German taxpayer money through the Hanns Seidel Foundation.
"We had the same problems in Europe years ago, starting 30 years ago with completely poisoned lakes, rivers, in Germany, poisoned air," said Waldemar Mathews, managing director of the Bavarian Institute of Applied Environmental Research and Technology. "And we started with the same
discussions."
ASEAN groups Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Myanmar and Thailand.
RSS