Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Glimpse of Future
The present indicators are that the affluent ICs will be able to maintain fairly
good environments in their countries. They have the money and the popular
will to require public and private agencies to do this. But the situation in the
DCs, which have the major share of land, environmental resources, and people
in the world, does not look good. Most DCs have neither the needed financial
resources nor the will to manage even the ongoing problems of environmental
pollution and accommodating the massive immigration of people from the rural
sector. The situation will be intensified by global warming and, again, the DCs
have much lower capabilities for coping. Hopefully, the ICs will give much
more attention to helping resolve the environmental problems of the DCs, as is
happening now — for example, by the 2007 pledge of the Group of 8 for increased
major reduction of poverty in Africa.
Recommendations
Some of the author's recommendations for consideration by the IAAs are given
in
94
, “How the Asian Development Bank Can Improve Their Technology Transfer
Operations for Water/Sanitation Projects in Developing Countries” (2005). These
recommendations are summarized in the sections on “Introduction” and on the
“Urban Water Supply.” Hopefully the IAAs will come around to giving serious
attention to these recommendations.
As noted in the subsection on “Eco-Resources Protection,” in the section on
“Development Planning for DCs,” the most serious single problem of natural
resources destruction in the DCs is their losses of natural forests, which has
reached unprecedented high levels in the past several decades, and it seems
that this degradation will continue, with little forest left by the mid-twenty-first
century, because of the inability of DC governments to impose controls. The
author's recommendations for saving the world's tropical forests are given in
Box 4.9. As for the problem on how to control global warming, the indicated
best approach is to reduce wastage of energy and to develop alternative energy
sources not dependent on the use of fossil fuels.
REFERENCES
1. Agrawal, G., and Ludwig, H. “Industrial Air Pollution Management in India —
Experiences and Lessons Learned,” Newsletter of Asian Society for Environmental
Protection, December 2002.
2. APHA/AWWA/WEF, “Standard Methods for Examination of Water and Wastewater,”
20th edition, 1999.
3. Asian Development Bank, “EIA for Bali Irrigation/Water Resources Management
Project,” by H. Ludwig/Institute of Water Resources Research (Bandung), 1981.
4. Asian
Development
Bank
(a),
“Industrial
Waste/Management
for
Samutprakarn
Region,” 1987.
