The cost of doing too little, too late
Dr Ooi Giok Ling, Today Online 11 Jul 08;
THE debate on the greening of lifestyles and consumption, particularly in affluent societies, has taken a rather economic turn.
Questioning the costs of greening efforts has tended to cloud the picture and confuse policymakers, the media and societies about the way forward just as it seemed they were waking up to the economic and environmental changes behind the spiralling fuel and food prices and inflation rates that we have not quite seen before.
Hence, the caution that greening should not be done at all costs is puzzling — hasn’t this position been partly responsible for the environmental challenges and ecological collapses the world is facing today?
Proponents focused on the economic costs of greening juxtapose poverty and hunger against an abstract promise of an ecologically and environmentally more sustainable future. This narrow view of working toward greater sustainability lends little clarity of the way forward. What we need is to think out of the box and shift away from scaremongering economics that misses the larger picture.
Thinking out of the box about sustainability takes into consideration technological breakthroughs, which have resulted in progress ranging from pasteurisation to the World Wide Web. These innovations have been driven less by concerns about costs, in the narrow economic sense, than by their benefits. Furthermore, tools such as cost-benefit analysis provide for a wider interpretation of costs and benefits — notions of social and political costs, as well as benefits to be realised from a range of policy options.
The tendency today is to consider a very narrow definition of costs and how these are computed. Available studies, however, show that thinking and acting more sustainably, in terms of our consumption, can only add to the collective good.
Business-as-usual scenarios are, on the other hand, likely to pass the collective costs — pollution, environmental degradation, resource depletion, climate change and associated natural hazards — to everybody. The benefits, in terms of profits, accrue mainly to a few individuals.
Singapore was one of the few countries that decided to clean up as it urbanised and industrialised and has not looked back since. It was one of the earliest among countries to establish a Ministry of Environment as well as effectively implement legislation and policies to combat air and water pollution, among other issues.
Singapore realised the costs in the widest sense, that “fouling” its own nest as well as polluting its air and water would leave the island-state with few alternatives in terms of creating a city in which to live, work and play in a safe and clean environment.
At the same time, its economy did not appear to have been hugely affected by the costs of its early environmental initiatives.
Indeed, the sums that have been done suggest that costs for cleaning up or “greening” for countries might be lower as they urbanise and industrialise, that is, clean up as the economy grows rather than leaving it to be done when they can afford it.
It is sound that each country should decide its own agenda for an environmentally and ecologically more sustainable future. After all, it is futile to force countries to undertake greening efforts for which they have no capacity or resources. Policies that cannot be implemented effectively contribute virtually nothing to the objectives they are meant to achieve, be these clean air or water.
Yet the governments of countries, no matter how poor, have to realise that in a world of inter-connected eco-systems, the environmental problems of one country can become a headache for neighbouring countries. This means that myopic societies too engrossed over short-term revenue-generation to consider the bigger picture and benefits in the long term are passing on the costs of not acting more sustainably.
The agenda for a more sustainable future, however, must bear in mind that it is the poor who inevitably bear the brunt of environmental problems. The poor are most likely to be the ones exposed to life-threatening work that exposes them to toxic waste and other hazards.
They are the ones who are very likely to be living in the most polluted areas and perhaps those who are most vulnerable to natural disasters. More often than not, the poor are also the ones without access to clean drinking water or permanent types of housing with adequate sewage facilities.
In other words, the costs of neglecting the environment, of not thinking about a more sustainable future, are being borne mainly by the hapless poor in most countries.
The writer is a humanities and socialstudies professor at the National Instituteof Education, Nanyang Technological University. The views expressed are her own.
