It’s an alarming pattern—both flooding and dry spells across Asia are becoming more intense, and occurring more frequently, each year.
So how should Asian governments respond? For a start, they can do better than simply blaming God or Nature, arguments rolled out by one Singaporean minister to explain the massive flooding there.
Flash floods, landslides, and other symptoms of climate change are also in part man-made disasters. In the case of Singapore, for example, some experts blame excessive property development in the city for rising floodwaters, while the Gansu landslide in China has been linked to massive deforestation, mining activities and the construction of several hydropower plants in the area.
Inadequate government planning is also a major reason for the rising human casualties. The Philippines drafted comprehensive flood control measures as early as 1976 but failed to implement the proposed engineering solutions to minimize the harmful impact of the annual floods. Water rationing is now being undertaken in Manila precisely because previous governments have failed to develop or tap other sources of clean water. If Malaysia doesn’t learn from the mistakes of the Philippines, it’s estimated that it too could encounter a water crisis in 2014.
But swiftly addressing these problems is about more than the immediate goal of saving lives in individual countries—doing so can also help prevent regional disputes. For example, the construction of several dams in China along the Mekong River has been pinpointed as one reason for the drop in water levels along the river, which is vital for servicing the water needs of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam (though of course China resents any suggestion that its damming activities are causing environmental problems for its neighbours).
There’s potential for such disputes to turn into conflict. For countries like Singapore confronted with scarce water supplies, it’s crucial that sustainable water agreements are inked with adjacent countries. Singapore has a water agreement with Malaysia, but the deal comes to an end next year. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad pondered in a blog entry whether it’s time to charge Singapore for the water it buys from Malaysia at adjusted market prices. This comes at a time when Malaysia is blaming Singapore’s land reclamation project for flooding in the Sungai Johor area. Could Malaysia and Singapore end up battling over clean water next year?
This isn’t, of course, the only potential flashpoint over water in Asia—India and Pakistan have already been widely cited as two countries at risk of conflict over Himalayan water sources.
But it’s still unclear whether there’s any urgency to take a more broad-based approach to tackling these problems.
Regional governments find plenty of time to meet and discuss trade imbalances, poverty and terrorism. But recent crises have demonstrated that it’s time they also stopped seeing problems such as the floods in Pakistan as simply national, internal issues and started taking a regional perspective instead. Failure to do so may well prove nothing short of disastrous.
Reddit
Digg
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Technorati
Yahoo
Google
Plurk
Helmut LUBBERS
The underlying problem is the excessive utilisation of nature, driven by the paradigm of continued economic growth. The idea is that growth is needed to create jobs for people. But even if this were correct, the policy does not consider that resources and space are finite. Normally more jobs eventuate automatically because more people need more food and stuff. Both population growth and expansion of the economy have been enabled by technology, which is totally dependent on fossil fuels – for which there is no alternative. On the other hand we, humanity, North and South, have overshot the earth’s carrying capacity by far. Growth produces increasing scarcities of food, minerals, space, clean water and climate change. So we may lament what we are doing wrong in individual areas. But at the end of the day we are virtually doomed if we don’t stop growing and start contracting. Population sizes and resource use must drop tremendously if we want to get back to a level of sustainability, which means that we can carry on as usual for a very long time. Present scale of human activity cannot accry on for a long long any more. After 250 generations of civilisation humanity may start crashing within this or the next generation. The disaster may be triggered by climate change. More probable seems the perspective of an increasingly reduced agricultural and industrial production because of the onset of the after-peak-oil era, within the next few years. That will produce the necessary reduction of humanity’s pressure on the environment. The costs will be high: famines and resource wars, rolling back of globalisation because transportation will become impossible for lack of fuels. The rich North will be hit like the poor South. Cities will empty, their people flowing onto the surrounding lands, trampling agricultural lands under their hungry feet. The end.
Helmut Lubbers ecoglobe.org
john
A Russian scientist has gone public and has suggested HAARP, a weather weapon owned and operated by the US may be the culprit for the weird weather of drought and flooding in Asia!