The robust growth of Asia over the past decade or so has helped the region to become one of the biggest consumers of material goods as countries transform themselves from agrarian societies into industrialised nations.
The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) has documented the change in a new report that compares the development of the 10 most important countries in the region and looks at material consumption around the region since the 1970s.
It shows Asia and the Pacific catching up in terms of per-capita consumption of materials compared to the world average, and even having surpassed the rest of the world in terms of total domestic materials consumption in 2005.
Asia Pacific has overtaken the rest of the world in consumption of raw and must improve its resource efficiency or risk losing ground in lifestyle, economic growth and environmental sustainability, the report warned.
Between 1970 and 2008, it said, consumption of construction minerals increased 13.4 times, metal ores and industrial minerals 8.6 times, fossil fuels 5.4 times, and biomass 2.7 times.
The general increase of material usage because of economic growth is not the only noticeable development. As well, there has been a highly visible shift away from biomass-based toward mineral-based materials, states the report, “Recent Trends in Material Flow and Resource Productivity in Asia and the Pacific 2013”.
Biomass includes primary crops, crop residue, grazed biomass, and wood.
This tendency can be found not only in the means of consumption but also in domestic extraction where biomass in the 1970s made up 57% of the total extraction in Asia-Pacific. By 2008 its share had declined to 25%, switching places with construction materials which accounted for 25% in 1970 and 53% in 2008.
The new importance construction materials are gaining among material consumption as well as extraction underlines the large investments in infrastructure most Asian countries are undertaking, says the report.
Even though domestic extraction has risen significantly over the last few decades (as seen in the annual 7.1% increase within the construction minerals category) it has not been sufficient to meet the fast growth and new lifestyles of the region, as annual growth in consumption demand has averaged 4.8%. This makes net imports of materials necessary and creates dependence on other markets, with attendant problems such as foreign-exchange volatility.
Another important environmental and sustainability index evaluated by the UNEP is material intensity, meaning domestic material consumption per dollar of GDP.
The index should decrease at around the same rate GDP increases in order to avoid placing more pressure on the environment. Instead, material intensity in Asia three times as high as in the rest of the world.
“Each dollar of GDP requires increasing amounts of materials,” said Dr Park Young-Woo, director of the UNEP Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific. “The findings do not show signs of decoupling of material consumption and natural resource use from economic growth in the region.”
The report finds that growing affluence and decreasing material efficiency are the most important drivers of pressure on the environment, even more so than population growth.
Some countries, even China, have had success in dealing with material intensity. Its intensity index has fallen from 9.4 kilogrammes per dollar of GDP to 8.7kg over three years. However, the decline in Japan has been from 0.29kg to 0.26kg per dollar in the same period.
China accounted for more than 60% of the region’s total domestic material consumption in 2008. India’s share was 14%, and no other country had more than 4%.
The continued growth in GDP led to an accelerated growth of 25% in domestic material consumption in China between 2005 and 2008, thus increasing the net imports, especially for fossil fuels and construction materials.
Indonesia, meanwhile, is emerging as an exporting nation of raw materials and especially fossil fuels, and even managed to decrease its material consumption per capita in recent years since 2005.
Thailand as well as South Korea and Malaysia are good examples of general ongoing socio-economic development, the report points out. These countries started as net exporters of biomass, adding the net export of construction materials in the late 1980s and decreasing their total dependence on petroleum imports by building up domestic production satisfying almost 40% of domestic consumption in 2008.
To combat growing pressure on the global environment even as the rest of the world improves in terms of material efficiency, Asia-Pacific countries must now strive to stabilise or even reduce the global impact of material consumption on the environment.
“The findings of the report conclude that countries in Asia and the Pacific face even greater challenges to make the transition of current economic growth patterns toward green growth, and to transform the economies into truly green economies, despite the strong efforts in development of policies and strategies by member countries,” said Dr Park.