Environmental Challenges in South Asia

Environmental Challenges in South Asia

Introduction

The situation in the countries of South Asia appears then to be characterized best by a dilemma. The macro picture relegates resource and environment linked issues to the background, often to be brought into the forefront only at the behest of international agencies or in the course of political negotiations centered around the management of the global commons such as the climate change and WTO negotiations. At the local levels, natural resources constitute a significant issue, both from the consumption and livelihood viewpoints and the emergence of non-governmental organizations has drawn the attention of civil society to it. Further, the state of knowledge with respect to interrelationships between the nature and scale of economic activity is often imperfect. A number of questions can be posed in this context.

The Environment In Economic Theory: Relevance For Developing Countries

Environmental issues have come to be focussed on, in particular in developing countries as the consequence of real life problems of degradation and an associated activism. It is therefore sometimes forgotten that economic theory, in particular its extensions and applications in the sixties and seventies have addressed some of these issues. This section shall examine these extensions with a focus on the two major functions that the environment performs with regard to economic activity: a sink for waste assimilation and a provider of resources inputs into production. The pervasive nature of these externalities and limits on the waste assimilative capacity of environmental sinks results in the need for such residues to be treated as a part of the materials balancing problem in the economy. The problem of externality management thus moves from the realm of microeconomics to that of macroeconomic management of the flow of materials in an input-output framework. The presence of waste generating externalities imposes a constraint on production levels in such a framework. More recent developments within the framework of control theory have extended the analysis to take account of the multiple functions that environmental resources perform in relation to human survival and economic activity.

From the viewpoint of developing economies, it may be more fruitful to keep this picture in the background. Of more practical relevance is the attempt to evolve an institutional structure at the national and the micro level that complements prices and markets and provides a coherent manner of accounting for externalities that matter and resources that impose constraints.

Economic Development And Environmental Degradation: The Macro View

From the viewpoint of developing countries striving for higher standards of living, the most pressing policy issue in the last few decades has been: Do environmental constraints impose limits on development processes? The popular perception is that caring for environmental conservation limits the pace of economic growth.7 At the same time, development is associated with energy intensive consumption patterns seen to be a driving force for environmental stress (Parikh et al. 1991). Also, poverty and over population are seen to be great polluters of another kind, leading as they do to greater demands ...