0.14 Related issues in sustainable development and the environment

Other dimensions of sustainable development

This chapter examines some acute environmental dilemmas facing poor countries in the 21st century. Chapter 22 discusses the most significant chronic environmental problem facing emerging nations: climate change.

Examples of acute conditions:

• Groundwater pollution from cadmium, mercury and other heavy metals (i.e. don’t eat fish caught in Tanjung Priok, Indonesia – Jakarta’s port.
• Air pollution, especially in Northern China
• Growing scarcity of freshwater supplies worldwide especially in China and India

Groundwater pollution has threatened the health of such densely populated urban areas as Jakarta, Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Silesia in Poland for decades. Rural dwellers face groundwater contamination from runoffs of pesticides and fertilizers, in at least a dozen developing countries, where heavily subsidized prices of these inputs have led to overuse. River and watershed pollution in 90s made such rivers as the Vistula in Poland unfit even for industrial use for a time. We have already noted the effects on nitrates pollution on drinking water in Czechoslovakia in the nineties, such that women with newborn infants were given priority to access to bottled water for their infants. In at least one Caribbean island, three and four year-old girls have shown up with a syndrome involving precocious development of adult sexual organs: unknown toxins that have found their way into the drinking water are prime suspects.

The air is at times as unbreathable in Mexico City as in Northern China due to air pollution. Erosion has led to such heavy siltation of man-made lakes for hydropower projects that the useful lives of many dams/hydro installations have been slashed from 75 to 10 years, in China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. In the Philippines and several other nations, coral reefs and valuable coastal fishing areas are being destroyed by sediments coming from far-away upland forests converted to shifting cultivation. And the cause of coastal degradation is not limited to deforestation . In several South American nations, mercury was long used to concentrate gold from gold ore. Methyl mercury pollution from decades ago has reached bays and coves in Brazil and Andean nations, resulting in human exposures hundreds of times above dangerous levels with widespread neurotoxic effects: The short term effects of such pollution on native populations is well recognized. But even worse, methyl mercury lingers in bays for hundreds of years. Virtually nothing is known about the more insidious long-term effects on human health.

We noted earlier that severe sustainability problems are now appearing in clumps or clusters, especially in urban and industrial areas in the tropics. As a result, officials and environmental groups from Mexico City to Jakarta and Bangkok confront the grim possibility of environmental triage : with limited financial resources and expertise, not all or even most urgent environmental dilemmas can be confronted. How does one choose which perils are to be dealt with first? How will decision-makers be guided in selecting how many divisions to shift to which environmental battlefield? What criteria will they use in these decisions? Should they invest in measures to reduce threats to human health for current generations, or should resources be concentrated upon reducing the risks facing the next generation? Can the nutritional and health effects of loss of employment for thousands of workers in polluting industries be ignored if these industries are shut down? Should saving the livelihoods of fishermen be given a heavier weight than the livelihoods of pulp and paper workers in decisions to close polluting coastal paper plants?