GEO-6 Regional Assessment for Asia and the Pacific
Need to address policy ineffectiveness
The Asia and the Pacific region boasts many environmental laws, plans, regulations and policies, and the region’s countries are members of a wide variety of multilateral environmental agreements and other environmental cooperation mechanisms. The effectiveness of these measures, however, is highly variable. There have been some beneficial outcomes and one can identify a set of good practice cases, but on the whole these best intentions have been insufficient to reverse the trend of increasing environmental degradation.
Some policies need to be made stronger, others are robust on paper but not effectively implemented, and still others are contradictory. Transformative change would require a strengthening of policies, policy coherence and a corresponding bolstering of their implementation. Regulation is needed to shift major investment away from unsustainable infrastructure and transport to cleaner modes of production, development and design, based on life-cycle approaches.
In the absence of regulation, market or incentive-based approaches that can send the right signal to both private and public actors are needed. China, for example, is using multiple approaches to strengthen environmental regulation and management. Starting in 2013, China launched seven provincial and regional emission-trading pilot programmes, with an eventual goal of scaling these up to the national level by 2016–2017 (IETA and CDC 2015). Combined with these market-based approaches, in 2014 China reformed its National Environmental Protection Law for the first time since 1973 to increase penalties for non-compliant enterprises, strengthen environmental courts and provide a greater voice to civil society organizations (Wubbeke 2014).
Many environmental problems are difficult to solve because they involve public goods, such as air, and externalities including pollution. Governments can also make environmental challenges more intractable through insufficient monitoring,
ineffective institutions, lack of funding, diminished capacity, and the belief that environmental concerns are too costly and that economic development is a separate, higher priority. These problems may be compounded with the next round of global environment and sustainability targets, the SDGs, which set 17 new goals and 169 targets for all countries to achieve by 2030.
1.5.3 New policy options
Policies for new challenges The fact that new environmental issues emerge over time and that priorities attached to these burgeoning challenges shift requires policies to be evaluated dynamically rather than only at a particular moment. This suggests a need for novel approaches to cope with new environmental problems. New policies aimed at delivering the SDGs will help sharpen the focus of policies and mobilize resources to address challenges and drivers systematically and holistically.
China, for example, has undergone five stages of policy development since the 1970s. China’s policy priorities have shifted from end-of-pipe to whole-process management, from point-source to integrated control of point and non-point sources, from focusing only on pollution control to attaching equal priority to pollution and ecological conservation, and from concentration-based to total load-based regulation of key pollutants (Wang 2010). As the government has become more concerned about tackling environmental problems and pursuing sustainable development, China has become more open to committing to further pledges at the international level. In November 2014, the United States of America (USA) and China agreed to a landmark climate pledge that committed China to a peak emissions year prior to 2030 (The White House 2014). Public health concerns as a result of record levels of air pollution from high coal consumption were major drivers of the Chinese government’s climate policies (Liu et al. 2015).
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