Nowhere are the contradictory challenges of sustainable development more evident than in Southeast Asia, where export-driven economies and infrastructure improvements have lifted people out of poverty, but up to 90 percent of the regions primary forests have been lost, reports the World Bank press review Monday.
International donors acknowledge that their funding practices have sometimes fueled both development and destruction, and have begun to attach environmental criteria to their funding policies. The Asian Development Bank (ADB), for instance, says it will no longer finance any rural infrastructure or other public investment project that significantly contributes to deforestation.
The World Bank says it is increasing lending to local conservation agencies. – Resources will be provided to countries that improve governance, said James Adams, the World Banks Vice President for Operational Policy and Country Services. The World Bank and the ADB are working with rights groups to pressure governments in the region to adopt legal frameworks that deter logging.
Still, legal frameworks achieve little without political will for change, which has often been lacking in the region. The banks, too, have sometimes ignored failures to meet forest management conditions set for their loans.
The World Bank released 15 million US dollar of a structural adjustment credit for Cambodia last year, despite illegal logging that continued unabated mostly to the benefit of a small group of companies and individuals with close ties to senior politicians.
But even if the lenders threaten to revoke substantial funding, the World Bank for instance, committed 300 million dollar to 48 biodiversity conservation projects in Southeast Asia from 1999 to 2004, they have less leverage than they did in the past because of Asias new wealth.
– Before, the developed world drove issues. Now what you see are financial surpluses in Asia, Adams said.
In particular, Chinas thirst for natural resources and its determination to play a larger role in Southeast Asia are overriding the effort to sponsor sustainable development in the region.
China is the worlds largest importer of illegally logged timber, said Kevin Conrad, Director of the recently established Coalition for Rainforest Nations at Columbia Universitys Earth Institute in New York. – Unless they stop, there is nothing we can do about illegal logging in the region, Mr. Conrad added.
Indonesia has lost more than four million hectares of forest since 2000, according to a report by the World Wildlife fund. Several Indonesian timber barons have been arrested, and their operations shut, since President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was elected on an anti-corruption mandate last year.
But many of these operations have quietly been restarted, said Jessica Lawrence, Executive Director of Borneo Project, an environmentalist and human rights group based in Berkeley, California.
Legal and illegal deforestation will continue unless alternative forms of livelihood are created, said Dana Clark, president of the International Accountability Project, another Berkeley-based environmental and human rights organization.
The World Bank is seeking to address that problem in part through a prototype carbon fund set up in 2000 to encourage the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and provide finance for sustainable development.
It is also helping to finance construction of a 1,3 billion dollar dam in Laos, the Nam Theun 2 hydroelectric project, which will provide one of the world’s poorest countries with a steady stream of revenue from electricity sales to neighboring Thailand.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
