Asia′s booming economy hastening climate change, WHO says
The World Health Organization warned Monday that the economic boom in Asia, especially in China and India, will hasten climate change and bring serious health implications unless urgent actions are taken.
Asia is too preoccupied with economic development to put priority on environmental issues, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific Shigeru Omi said.
"This is the center of economic development, India, China, but the consequences of mishandling (the environment) affect everybody," Omi told reporters on the sidelines of the WHO Workshop on Climate Change and Health in Southeast and East Asian Countries in Kuala Lumpur.
In his speech to open the workshop, Omi said the root cause of climate change is increasing emissions of greenhouse gasses and Asia is set to become a major culprit.
"In recent years, energy consumption in Asia has sharply increased due to rapid economic expansion and industrialization in countries such as China and India. Asia's share of greenhouse gas emissions in the world is expected to grow larger, and urgent action is needed to mitigate this situation," he said.
As temperatures worldwide rise, there has been an increase in the frequency and intensity of typhoons, flooding and droughts.
The economic impact aside, diseases like malaria are now emerging in places where they did not exist before like South Korea, Omi said. Dengue hemorrhagic fever continues to plague urban areas.
To illustrate his point, Omi said, "In Singapore, the mean annual temperature rose from 26.9 C in 1978 to 28.4 C in 1998 and the number of dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever cases increased more than 10-fold, from 384 in 1978 to 5,258 in 1998."
In Shanghai, he said, in the summer of 1998, heat-related mortality increased to three times the norm after several days of temperatures hitting above 40 C.
He urged Asian countries to deal with climate change as urgently as they tackle communicable diseases like avian flu.
"This kind of preparedness must be applied to environmental issues because we know it's just a matter of time, environmental disaster will come," Omi said.
He proposed that governments develop innovative policies like tax incentives and subsidies to encourage use of clean and energy-saving technologies.
Developed countries, he said, can help poorer nations with environmentally friendly technologies.
"It is time to give more attention and focus on global warming issues, more sustainable economic development. We need wisdom to strike a balance between the two," he added.
The four-day workshop that started Monday, attended by experts from 16 countries and various international organizations, is a prelude to the first ministerial meeting on environment and health in Southeast and East Asian countries to be held in Bangkok on Aug. 8-9.
As the global mean temperature is forecast to increase by as much as 6 C by the end of the century, these meetings aim to undertake measures to deal with the situation.
A recent study by the WHO has estimated that climate change directly or indirectly contributes to about 77,000 deaths in Asia and the Pacific annually, representing about half of the world's total deaths attributed to climate change.
Last Updated: Wed, 04 Jul 2007 20:54:00
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