Catalog

1. The Need for Environmental Interventions to Reduce Poverty

6. Environmental degradation is taking its toll on poor people and foreclosing their options for healthy and productive lives. Poverty-environment linkages take different forms in rural and urban contexts. In rural areas, critical issues concern access to and depletion of natural resources such as land, forests and their products, water, and fisheries. Local communities depend on the biological resources provided by the forests, land, and marine environments for their livelihoods, for food, clothing, shelter, energy, and medicine. Adverse human interventions and activities, climate changes, increased numbers of natural disasters, and the pressures of poverty and population are accelerating the rates of resource loss and degradation. Combined with rural population pressure, the opportunities for the rural poor to survive on a diminishing natural resource base are marginal at best. Without intervention to improve management or rehabilitation, their choices are limited to abandoning their lands, usually by moving to the city, or further reducing the resource base upon which they depend.

7. In urban areas, the poverty-environment agenda relates to the disproportionate impact on the poor of overall use of environmental resources such as water or air as sinks for pollution or the disposal of human and industrial waste. In most Asian cities, and many Pacific island towns, the principal water bodies are heavily polluted with domestic sewage, industrial effluents, chemicals, and solid wastes. Wastes from the chemical, metallurgical, and processing sectors frequently contain toxic substances such as heavy metals, solvents, and organic compounds. These problems create huge costs in public health (high morbidity and mortality rates, notably among infants, young children, and women are pervasive due to pollution-related causes) and reduced productivity losses. It has been estimated, for example, that indoor air pollution alone causes more than a million premature deaths in the DMCs. Rapid and largely unplanned urban growth has resulted in serious overcrowding in slum settlements inadequately supplied with safe drinking water, sanitation, and other environmental infrastructure. This rapid urbanization has outpaced the development of environmental infrastructure and taxed responsive urban governance in many large cities.

8. The Asia and Pacific region experiences 60% of major man-made and natural disasters worldwide. The region loses $5 billion to $10 billion per annum and experiences enormous human suffering when disaster strikes. Between 1987 and 1996, the total cost of damage as a consequence of natural disasters in Asia and the Pacific was estimated at $51 billion. The poor and disadvantaged are especially vulnerable to natural hazards and are least resilient. Disasters are frequently caused by natural resource degradation and their severity is exacerbated by poorly planned human settlements and lack of basic infrastructure. The severity of natural and man-made disasters is greater in countries where prevention, preparedness, mitigation, and response capacities are inadequate. Many governments have noticed the linkages between deforestation, desertification, and coastal degradation and the increased frequency, severity, and costs of natural disasters such as floods, drought, and fires. DMCs need help to reduce hazard vulnerability and prevent disasters through improved natural resource management.

9. ADB is responding to increased recognition of the environmental dimension of poverty reduction by shifting from a reactive approach to environmental problems and environmental due diligence to a more proactive and strategic stance that actively assists DMCs to anticipate and tackle environmental issues. Environment was recognized as a strategic development objective in the mid nineties.⁴ This approach required ADB to balance its focus on economic growth in DMCs with support for protecting the environment, along with social development, improvement in the living standards of the poorest groups, and a reorientation of the public sector to meet these new priorities. ADB has provided almost $8 billion for projects with environmental objectives, though a gap remains between the high policy priority attached by ADB to environmental issues, the financial outlay for projects having environmental objectives, and the attainment of positive environmental outcomes. The priority for environment lending will need to be on poverty relevant natural resource management and environment quality issues. A sharper focus on potentially replicable approaches is required to ensure that urgent environmental problems facing the poor in urban and rural contexts are prioritized and addressed.

2. The Need to Mainstream Environmental Considerations in Economic Growth

10. Stakeholders in development sometimes act as though the elimination of poverty and economic growth are distinct from environmental goals. Where environmental sustainability requirements have been identified, they are rarely fully integrated into economic development and sector policies even where these make obvious economic sense. It is estimated that the annual economic costs of environmental degradation already lie between 4–8% of gross domestic product (GDP) in various DMCs. Currently, public expenditures on the environment are less than 1% of GDP in many DMCs. Although DMCs have established legal frameworks and institutions for environmental protection, not all have adopted appropriate policies, regulatory systems, and institutional resources that ensure compliance and enforcement. Market and policy failures have led to environmental considerations being externalized from the development process. Ambiguous property rights have led to depletion of de facto open access resources. Perverse subsidies have encouraged economically irrational overuse of polluting inputs, such as agrochemicals. Without enabling policies that provide appropriate incentives, opportunities for private sector involvement in provision of environmental services have not been tapped. Unless greater attention is paid to these issues, the sustainability of economic growth may be compromised. In the absence of economic growth, poverty reduction prospects will be severely curtailed.

11. The emphasis of ADB’s environment-related technical assistance (TA) has been on capacity building. ADB has been assisting DMCs, including the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and India, to (i) establish and strengthen the capacity of national environmental and sector development agencies; (ii) introduce environmental assessment regulations and guidelines to ensure integrated environmental and development planning and management; and (iii) implement policy, legislative, and institutional reforms. ADB has also helped mainstream environment into the agriculture, natural resources, water resources, industrial, transport, and urban sectors in several DMCs. For example, in Indonesia ADB has focused on developing institutional capacity for environmental management within sector development agencies and supporting efforts to decentralize environmental management responsibility. At a national planning level, ADB has assisted in the preparation of national environment strategies, as in the case of Pacific island DMCs, and national frameworks for environmental management in high priority sectors, such as hydropower and roads in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The growing emphasis on supporting DMCs in environmental policy integration, mainstreaming environment across development sectors, and strengthened capacity for compliance and enforcement needs to continue. A summary of ADB TA on environment is shown in Appendix 4.

3. The Need to Maintain Global and Regional Life-Support Systems

12. Life-support systems are the ecological processes that shape climate, cleanse the air and water, regulate water flow, recycle essential elements, and keep the planet fit for life. Human activities are rapidly altering these processes through pollution and the destruction and modification of ecosystems. Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere, intensifying its heat-trapping properties and leading to climate change. Coastal ecosystems are rapidly deteriorating in many areas due to intense and mounting human pressure, including poorly controlled urban, industrial, commercial, tourist, agricultural development, and uncontrolled waste disposal. Human activities are also accelerating the loss of habitat and species and changing the conditions for evolution. A key concern is that the poorest DMCs are likely to bear the brunt of problems arising from climate change and sea level rise; increased drought and desertification; and loss of biodiversity, especially agro-biodiversity. Within the DMCs, the most poor and already vulnerable groups will be least able to cope with these changes. In the long term, the sustainability of economic growth and the very continuation of human existence will depend on the maintenance of global life support systems.

13. Managing the global common goods and addressing global environmental externalities will depend on effective DMC participation in intergovernmental negotiations and compliance with multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). It will also require more active efforts to translate the broad principles and provisions of MEAs into meaningful frameworks for national and local-level implementation. In addition, DMCs will need to consider strategies and planning for local and national adaptation to global environmental changes. In recognition of this, ADB has begun to address the linkages among global, regional, and local environmental issues and the cooperation needed to maintain life support systems, and has supported regional and subregional cooperation on the environment through its regional TA program. ADB has also increasingly assisted DMCs in addressing global and transboundary environmental issues, including climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity conservation, international waters, desertification in the PRC and central Asia, acid rain in northeast Asia, and impacts of atmospheric haze from forest fires in southeast Asia.

14. Overall support for transboundary issues has been and will continue to be grounded in regional cooperation. ADB has assisted South Asia in collaboration with (i) subregional organizations and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for development of a subregional air quality management protocol; and (ii) the World Conservation Union (IUCN) to develop a regional coastal and marine resource management agreement, which covers several South Asian countries. ADB has been providing continued support in the Pacific and in many other DMCs for adapting to climate change. ADB has also been playing a key role in fostering regional cooperation and sustainable development in the Greater Mekong Subregion. A similar program is under way in the Central Asian republics where, in partnership with UNEP, ADB is helping to prepare and implement a regional cooperative environment action plan. Key considerations in determining future support include the need to (i) focus mainly on the interface between locally important and globally significant environmental issues; (ii) pay special attention to regional dimensions of transboundary issues and cooperation among countries; and (iii) mobilize new financial sources and modalities for cooperative action.

4. The Need to Work in Partnership with Others

15. ADB resources are small in relation to the environmental needs of the region. Combating environmental degradation while reducing poverty cannot be done in isolation. To be more effective, it is necessary to exchange knowledge and learn from the experience of other development agencies, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), the private sector, and academia. The resources and skills of all stakeholders from civil society, the private sector, and government will need to be mobilized to replicate and extend the impact of ADB's catalytic efforts. Strengthening existing partnerships and forging new ones will also enable DMCs to address issues that are of regional and global importance but cannot be addressed solely at the country level. Partnerships are also important to enhance coordination, as duplication between country-level frameworks for environment and sustainable development has sometimes caused confusion and strained limited human and financial resources in a number of DMCs.

16. During the last few years, environmental partnerships with subregional, regional, and international organizations have been instrumental in stimulating new ideas and assistance programs, increasing development impact from ADB-financed TA, and facilitating support from a number of bilateral agencies. Some organizations with which ADB has formed strategic partnerships include the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Conservation International, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), IUCN, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), South Asian Cooperation on Environment Program (SACEP), South Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), UNEP, United States-Asia Environment Partnership, World Bank, and Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).⁵ Existing partnerships will need to be deepened, and new partnerships will need to be forged for emerging issues such as measurement of national environmental performance.

17. It is equally important to grasp the critical role of bilateral and international agencies in facilitating ADB’s program of environmental assistance through targeted cofinancing. Such bilateral support from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland and multilateral cofinancing from the GEF have enabled ADB to increase support to DMCs for improving environmental management. Expanded opportunities for such collaboration need to be explored and developed to meet the urgent needs of the DMCs, particularly with regard to poverty-environment initiatives (combating land degradation and improving the urban environment), biodiversity conservation, global climate change, and environmental performance assessment.