Regional Context and Priorities


(Marlier et al. 2013, Miriam et al. 2015), and a weakened Indian monsoon, adding to the stress on farming communities and leading to food price increases.


1.4.6 Integrated environmental health risks


While greater understanding of the links between the environment and health has emerged in the last five centuries, McMichael (1993) proposed a new category of environmental risk; those that undermine civilisation’s life support mechanisms. This concept is fundamentally different from that of traditional environmental health concerns, including many that are newly emerging. The difference between the two lies chiefly in their scale and the long causal chain between exposure and effect. For example, Zika virus is a viral vector-borne disease recently recognized as emerging in the Pacific, and likely causing microcephaly and perhaps other birth defects. However, even Zika lacks the causal potential to undermine civilisation and thus ruin


Key Messages


The region has seen increasing policy intervention to cope with existing environmental issues, improve ecosystem quality and achieve sustainable development. Drafting of laws and regulations, applying market-based instruments and the use of voluntary approaches, has generally contributed to environmental improvement. But there is a widening gap between policy and implementation, due to ineffective policy implementation, a poor scientific base for policy formulation and emerging environmental issues.


• Uneven policy development to address regional issues such as climate change and air quality due to different policy priorities.


• Changing consumption patterns and skyrocketing energy consumption have led to poor performance on environmental issues.


• The use of multilateral agreements and treaties has great potential throughout the region but enforcement and implementation are uneven.


• Resources and capacity are inadequate to finance and support policy formulation and execution.


Building stronger institutions and governance are especially important, including mainstreaming the environment in other policy areas, adopting integrated policy approaches, collaborative governance with greater public participation in decision making and strengthening the judicial system for better enforcement.


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population health. In contrast, climate change, biodiversity loss beyond critical thresholds, not yet determined, and the over-exploitation of natural resources, unless substituted, do have this capacity (McMichael and Butler 2011, Whitmee et al. 2015).


1.5 Widening of gaps between policy and implementation


This section discusses the divergence of policies created but often poorly implemented to address environmental issues in the Asia and the Pacific region. The income disparity between countries in the Asia and the Pacific region partly, but imperfectly, explains the differences in each nation’s capacity to cope effectively with environmental challenges. Despite these problems, environmental policy in the region does have some bright spots, mostly because social demand is increasing for robust measures to address growing environmental challenges.


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