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	Table of Contents
p. 10 of 57 BACK | NEXT I. The Changing Environment II. Driving Forces of Change Population Explosion Urbanization and Industrialization Income Growth and Inequality Technological Changes Governance Institutions, Policy, and the Market Toward Sustainable Development III. Options and Opportunities IV. Toward Policy Integration V. Call to Action

Asian Environment Outlook 2001

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II. Driving Forces of Change

Prospects for a livable future in the region remain at best clouded with uncertainty if the driving forces that are causing the deterioration of the environment continue on a destructive trajectory.

As discussed in Chapter 1, environmental degradation is a constraint on future growth within the Asia and Pacific region and a barrier to efforts to eradicate severe poverty. Prospects for a livable future in the region remain clouded with uncertainty if the driving forces that are causing the deterioration of the environment continue on a destructive trajectory. Environmental quality cannot be achieved by addres-sing only isolated symptoms. Prescriptions for change must be aimed at the behavior, go-vernance, economic fundamentals, and development of integrated approaches that will have lasting impacts on the root causes of environmental degradation.

This chapter discusses the impacts of driving forces on the environment in the region: population growth, urbanization and industrialization, income growth and inequality, technological changes, governance, institutions, policy, and the market. It also discusses building opportunities based on these emerging trends.

Many powerful driving forces of change in the Asia and Pacific region are neither inherently good nor bad for the environment. The environmental impacts of intensified international flows of capital and technology, for example, depend very much on the energy, materials, and pollution intensity of the technologies involved, from power plants to industrial machinery. Environmental outcomes depend on how these driving forces of change are channeled and harnessed to achieve different societal ends.

The driving forces underlying patterns of poor environmental quality and extensive environmental degradation in the Asia and Pacific region include the following:

• A growing population that demands more energy, materials, and ecosystem services
• Extensive urbanization and industrialization
• Income growth, unequal distribution of wealth, and widespread poverty
• Use of technologies that are based on inefficient energy and material use and that generate and release excessive waste
• Lack of participation of civil society and the private sector, and forms of governance that exclude the majority of stakeholders
• Weak institutions and inappropriate policies that promote inefficiencies and fail to capture the externalities of economic activity

Documenting the processes underlying environmental degradation is only a first step. It is necessary to take the next step of defining effective points of leverage over these powerful drivers of change, including the geographical scales at which critical decisions are made concerning these processes. One source of concern within the region is a perception that the locus of control over many key dynamics (such as investment, consumption patterns, and technology change) is increasingly shifting outside of the DMCs through the process of economic globalization.

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