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BANGKOK (AFP) - Asia lacks the institutions and the political will to prevent looming environmental catastrophes caused by rapid growth, experts at a conference on the region's future said.
They warned of an Asia laid waste by massive deforestation, buried under industrial and municipal wastes, choked by toxic air and ravaged by an irreversible loss of biodiversity. "The capacities of governments ... to implement and enforce environmental standards need to be greatly improved," said four academics in a joint paper. "Geopolitical imperatives have frequently overshadowed environmental concerns, undermining efforts to better manage and protect the region's natural resource base," they added.
Too many Asian states do not devote a high enough percentage of their budgets to environmental preservation said the report, released at a conference entitled the "Third Dialogue on Building Asia's Tomorrow." They said that even when resources have been allocated towards conservation, they have typically been squandered.
Regional geopolitical disputes over fishing rights and water rights, as well as massive corruption in environment ministries, have diluted regional nations' ability to manage their environment.
"Environmental policies and laws in Asian countries are entangled with widespread corruption at all levels of government, cronyism and money politics. There is a pressing need to severely limit the space for political and administrative discretion in the allocation of natural resources."
As a result of two decades of unregulated development and poor environmental management, Asia faces looming environmental catastrophes, said Simon Tay of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs.
Although Asia is the seat of a "rich environmental heritage," it is plagued by worsening and widespread "soil degradation, deforestation and wetland conservation," Tay said in a separate paper. "Poor, often unhealthy air and water quality are a common feature of many of the large urban agglomerations in Asia," he added.
Asia's share of the world's carbon dioxide emissions will grow by twenty-five percent over the next hundred years, he said. "Clearly then, the resolution of the global warming problem hinges on what happens in the Asia-Pacific region."
If Asia's environment is to survive the next century without completely collapsing, governments in the region must make environmental issues equal in priority to economic development, said delegate Chia Siow Yue of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
The conference, which ended this Monday, drew over 120 leading academics and policy-makers from around the region for two days of talks on Asia's environmental and population pressures.
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