Air, water, coastal areas and forests can be considered as “local public goods” which should be available to all. Degradation of these assets reduces a city’s competitiveness. More and more, people are demanding clean air, clean water and a pristine environment and those cities that cannot provide will lose their competitive edge. This may already be happening. For example, in Hong Kong, recruiting agencies are finding it increasingly difficult to encourage professionals to work and to stay in the city because of its deteriorating air quality. Clearly, the scope for improving sustainability lies with directing the economic growth of developing cities along a more sustainable path and changing the way in which developed cities work to reduce their ecological footprint. In the developing world the focus needs to be on mitigating existing negative economic, social and environmental conditions and ensuring that negative environmental impacts do not increase with economic development as they have in the developed world.⁵²

Progressive thinking towards encouraging sustainable development is now moving away from taxing businesses and people, to charging those who pollute the environment. The aim is make environmental costs understood by consumers. Other options include prohibition, regulation, and market mechanisms. Fuel duty in the UK is one example of where high taxes have not reduced emissions significantly, mainly because consumers are not given incentives or suitable alternatives to enable them to leave their cars at home. Polluter pays approaches to air pollution, where permits to pollute are issued, paid for, and are tradable, are possible alternative approaches to prescriptive, static regulation, but they require legislation at national level and consistent enforcement locally.

A poor environment is directly responsible for around 25% of all preventable ill health in the world today, and two-thirds of those affected are children.⁵⁹ They fall sick because of a lack of essential environmental resources – chief among them sufficient and clean water, food, shelter, fuel, and air. People also become ill through exposure to hazards in the environment. Many diseases are linked to environmental problems such as polluted drinking water, poor air, waste disposal and exposure to mosquitoes and other carriers of disease. But changes in the way people live and work can also cause a sudden increase in old diseases or the emergence of new ones. Overcrowding and industrialization affect the health of millions in the developing world. The emergence of some 30 new diseases in the past 20 years, including HIV, ebola and hemorrhagic illnesses, has become a growing public health issue. Tobacco now kills over 11,000 people a day worldwide.

The scale of the urban fringe problem is large and growing. The urban population of East Asia is expected to increase by an average of 21 million every year between 2006 and 2030, with an annual increase of 17 million for China, 1 million for Vietnam and 0.2 million in the Philippines. Most of this growth will be accommodated on the urban fringe. Yet neither markets nor governments provide the right incentives for sustainable development of these areas. The consequences of this failure are large and many, including the proliferation of un-serviced informal settlements, development that leaves existing residents worse off, encroachment on environmental areas, and even more pollution. Clearly circumstances vary between countries. For example, China’s rapid growth, strong institutions and proactive approach to urbanization is different from the Philippines where there is a general lack of effective planning control or direction. In the latter case development happens largely as a result of market forces and is particularly influenced by the development of major roads and trunk water supply.⁶⁶ The issue is not so much a lack of understanding by governments, but it is their prioritization of effort that determines outcomes.

The issues surrounding sustainable infrastructure and service delivery show that the status quo does not offer the solution. Nor is there a clear pathway to resolving the competing pressures which characterize sustainable urban service provision. In many urban areas, services are failing and the level of infrastructure is declining. This has serious implications. Water, sanitation and wastewater treatment and disposal are critical for sustainable development. Solid waste management also presents an increasingly complex problem and has significant impacts on both public health and greenhouse gas emissions.

A number of countries in Asia have recently introduced solid waste management legislation which seeks to provide a policy framework for dealing with the increasingly difficult problems associated with the handling, disposal and recycling of municipal solid waste. In the case of India, the problem is that solid waste management is a local government responsibility and higher levels of government have little enforcement capacity on those that do not comply with the regulations. The Philippines’ Republic Act 9003 dealing with solid waste management and recycling is visionary, but so far largely not implemented. Greater success with efforts to legislate on issues relating to waste disposal and particularly waste minimization has been achieved in some Asian countries. The EU’s packaging legislation, designed to reduce the amount of packaging which has to be disposed of by placing greater responsibility for its reuse or disposal on producers, has been successful in reducing the amount of waste in landfills. There are now EU-wide targets for waste minimization in other areas which are designed to achieve a dramatic reduction in waste through an increase in materials reused, recycled or recovered. However, the overall sustainability of moves to increase recycling is a complex issue. For instance, a recent report on the UK government’s recycling targets pointed out that some material recovery used more energy than it saved thus contributing further to greenhouse gas emissions.

A recent ADB study⁸³ of energy policy highlights some key lessons. Lending policy since 2000 has emphasized the development of independently regulated and privatized energy markets which were expected to lead to more efficient uses of energy, lower costs, and greater private investment. However, energy market reform has been slower than expected given the renegotiation of power purchase agreements (PPAs) by several countries, a lack of investor confidence, political influence to keep tariffs below cost levels, and unacceptably high system losses. The evaluation highlights difficulties in building regulatory expertise and independence, insufficiently deep and liquid markets for trading electricity contracts, a major withdrawal of independent power producers (IPPs) from the Asian market, and declines in funding for generation projects in the public sector and for transmission and distribution investments. The type and destination of lending has reflected a growing concern with environmental effects, with a particular focus on renewable energy emerging.

Provision of adequate potable water and sanitation to growing urban populations is made more complex by the long history of imbalance of supplies and facilities between the rich and poor, and the under-pricing of water, sanitation and solid waste services which has frequently been viewed as a social rather than an economic good. While the urgent need for improved water and sanitation services, particularly for the poor, remains a critical Millennium Development Goal pressure on fresh water resources is increasing, as is their destruction through inadequate waste treatment and disposal practices. While provision of adequate water supply, sanitation and solid waste centers can be regarded as a fundamental right in modern urban society, they also rely for their delivery on complex administrative, management, financial and regulatory structures, and are heavily influenced by political considerations.

Urban ecologies to reduce waste

Considerable amounts of waste are generated from manufacturing and construction activity. Estimates are that this may be as high as four times that generated by households. Success is achieved when waste is reabsorbed into the system following what happens in nature which has no waste because of symbiosis.⁸⁴ Industrial symbiosis offers such a solution, whereby the waste or by product of one enterprise becomes the resource or input of another.

National and city governments no longer have the option of hoping that reactive management will be enough to solve the problems of transport, infrastructure and utilities and of air and water pollution. The reactive approach has largely failed as illustrated by the widespread transport crisis in almost all Asia’s cities, the lack of wastewater treatment and growing air pollution. The issues have now become too important to ignore with global, national and local dimensions. But the pervasive ‘inter-connectedness’ between a wide range of policy issues poses the major challenge to effective city management and provision of needed infrastructure.