Straits Times 12 Jan 10;
WHEN I read the papers on Sunday morning, the same three recurring themes that captured the public's imagination throughout last year clearly dominated the headlines again in the first week of this year.
Jobs data and the recession, rising property prices (fuelled by a good dose of full-page advertisements touting the latest launches) and more natural disasters. One can deduce why so much attention is paid to the first two - the first is fear, the second is greed with perhaps some fear that one will be left out of the spoils. The third requires a little more effort to understand.
Yes, the stories of extreme weather, airport closures, train delays and flash floods caught my attention. Like the rest of the world, I pay attention for obvious reasons - ignoring them could mean great inconvenience and cost or even danger, affecting business and holiday travel plans. Cancellations and delays in transport and trade have an economic cost to both lives and businesses. Sadly, unlike with the recession or property prices, most of us do little more than try to work around the problem. Perhaps it is because we all feel there is little we can do. Perhaps we have short memories and forget about the rain when the sun shines again.
What I find curious and disturbing is the fact that when job creation slows and job losses increase, societies and businesses find ways, often ingenious, to spur the former and reverse the latter. When property prices spiral out of control, governments and industry are quick to introduce measures to cool the overheating.
However, we sorely neglect the leading indicators for a better planet, whose deterioration will lead to unbearable economic costs, among others. One does not have to look far for warning signs of overheating and imminent collapse.
Millions of lives in Indonesia, the Philippines, India and Vietnam are disrupted every year with alarming frequency and increasing regularity due to tidal disasters. China and Korea are experiencing the coldest winter in decades. Entire cities in America and Europe have been crippled by unprecedented snowfall.
How much more impetus do we need before we go beyond media awareness to concrete and concerted action?
Apart from making headlines, little more is usually reported about causes and measures to prevent future occurrences. We would do well to go beyond daily weather forecasts to environmental reporting. The media has done a good job raising awareness of environmental challenges with extensive coverage, but it needs to do more by highlighting the root causes of these increasingly worrying outcomes, be it freak weather or the trail of destruction it leaves in its wake. More details on how it happened, why it happened, and most important, why it will happen again, are an effective way.
An environmental index that tracks the health of our endangered planet is long overdue. The environment will never receive the attention it warrants until governments, societies and businesses value it in measurable economic terms. Until that happens, the world will remain ignorant, apathetic and uninterested in the rapid depletion of our biggest economic asset - Mother Earth and her natural resources.
Jack Lim
