ASIA FILE The danger of travelling pollution We need to know where trans-boundary emissions are going and take urgent steps to control them, says Barun Roy When Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines blew up in June 1991, ash from its eruption traveled as far away as Singapore. When forest fires devastated the Indonesian provinces of Sumatra and Kalimantan in 1997, haze resulting from the catastrophe affected 70 million people throughout the region and caused tourism and production losses in Singapore and Malaysia. Both disasters showed that air pollution, accidental or manmade, is no respecter of boundaries, and a new one brewing in Korea is pressing the same point home right now.
The Koreans are upset and angry because clouds of yellow dust from the deserts of Mongolia and China are invading their country once again and these contain sulfates, nitric acid, silicon, lead, and other heavy metallic elements harmful to human health. The dust has been an 'uninvited annual guest' in Korea for many years now, stunting crop growth, damaging property, causing various eye and respiratory ailments, and even choking precision machinery in factories. But this year's attack is particularly bad as the dry season in Mongolia and China has been unusually long.
The invasion reopens the question of trans-boundary air pollution in Asia, particularly northeast Asia. Koreans claim some 3,40,000 tons to 3,67,000 tons of sulfur dioxide from China reach their peninsula every year, emanating mostly from coal-fired power plants in that country. The Japanese say they get to suffer as well and the Chinese don't deny the emissions entirely. But Korea and Japan can't be all that innocent either. Their rapid industrial and urban growth dumps harmful elements in the atmosphere, too, and these elements travel with the wind to other countries. On March 15, 1999, Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, reported a study that identified east Asia as a large and growing source of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, radon, aerosols, hydrocarbons, and other chemicals in the air over the US west coast.
The Chinese can do little about the yellow dust. But the countries surely can work together to minimize the impact of pollution that travels across boundaries. But nobody seems terribly keen to do so. This is clear from the fate of two specific initiatives supposed to handle common environmental problems. One is the Northeast Asian Sub-regional Programme of Environmental Cooperation (Neaspec), established in 1993, and the other, the Northwest Pacific Action Plan (Nowpap), launched in 1994. These programmes still don't have secretariats of funds of their own. A framework agreement is all that exists. There is no formal operational structure, and the only projects so far undertaken are those that the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has funded under its normal China programme to reduce pollution in Chinese coal-fired power plants.
A clamour for more purposeful action is likely to be raised at a meeting about the two programmes in Seoul in April. The first step is to install a network of systems to monitor the magnitude of trans-boundary pollution. There's none at the moment, not even a regional database for sulfur dioxide emissions.
One reason why cooperation in this respect is slow is that the countries won 't accept they are the offenders unless there's recorded evidence to show otherwise. The RAINS (Regional Acidification Information and Simulation System) Asia model, developed jointly by ADB, the world Bank, and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, determines the impact of sulfur dioxide emissions from point sources, but that's not enough.
We need to know where these emissions are going and we need to know this across the entire region. Trans-boundary air pollution won't remain a northeast Asian problem. It has started to affect southeast Asian countries as well. And how can we be sure that pollutants from Kathmandu or Dhaka, for example, are not wafting towards India, or those from India's coal-fired power stations aren't invading its neighbours?