Last updated: Nov. 15, 2022
Introduction
East Asia’s flourishing economy in the decades following World War II has long been a double-edged sword for the region’s billions of inhabitants. On one hand, large factories and cosmopolitan metropolises have sprung up under massive industrialization, resulting in the upsurge of both urban population and incomes. On the other hand, the region’s development has been accompanied by a rapid increase in pollutant accumulation and the ensuing deterioration of local air quality, particularly within its three economic bellwethers: China, South Korea, and Japan. It is in the interest of these nations’ policymakers to unite in combating pollution and its negative externalities.
Where Do East Asia’s Air Pollution Issues Come From?
The origin of air pollution in East Asia is characterized by its intricacy as such an environmental concern is subject to multiple factors stemming from the region’s socioeconomic and geopolitical conditions. High-polluting fossil fuels, such as coal and petroleum, represent a large share of the region’s total energy consumption. However, this consumption has led to the emergence of toxic smog and acid rain that incurs severe health and economic damage among East Asians. In China, coal burning has resulted in an increase of chronic respiratory diseases associated with high emissions of hazardous substances, including sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides.[1] Despite higher levels of industrial development compared to China, South Korea and Japan consume higher proportions of fossil fuels. South Korea and Japan have a particularly high consumption rate of petroleum compared to other developed economies and, therefore, are afflicted by the public health reverberations of inordinate pollutant emissions.[2] In recent years, air pollution in these three countries has generated heavy economic losses, as evidenced by the high welfare costs from pollution-related illnesses and production disruption. By 2060, such an environmental problem is expected to incur per-capita welfare costs from diseases of more than US$ 300, around US$ 500, and almost US$ 600 in Japan, South Korea, and China, respectively, leaving the economic damage in these three countries much worse than in most economies of the world.[3]
Apart from socioeconomic factors, East Asia’s air pollution issues have been complicated by the region’s geographical environment and political situation. Yellow dust storms from inner Eurasia that regularly travel through prevailing eastward winds play a vital role in contaminating the atmospheric environment of East Asia. In the spring, sandstorms from the Gobi Desert on the Sino-Mongolian border often mingle with smog, creating severe air pollution for thousands of kilometers.[4] Numerous East Asian megacities, including Beijing and Seoul, have fallen victim to this extreme weather phenomenon. For the region’s developed countries, the spread of industrial discharges from neighboring emerging economies also contributes to the worsening of their air quality. For example, South Korea protests China’s overconsumption and its resulting air pollution. Seoul contends that the newly modernized Asian giant’s extensive industrial emissions have generated considerable particulate matter in South Korean cities.[5] However, these claims fail to attribute accountability to either South Korea’s various domestic sources of producing ultrafine dust or the involvement of South Korean heavy industrial investors in creating pollution in China.[6] Moreover, these one-sided condemnations do not help to decrease air pollutant levels at home or facilitate transboundary environmental management between the two neighbors.
What Measures Have Been Taken and What Else Can Be Done?
Facing the pervasive air pollution, policymakers of the three East Asian powerhouses have carried out a series of pro-environmental programs to enhance their people’s physical and economic well-being. From Tokyo’s 1993 Basic Law on the Environment that symbolized “the legislative expression of the government’s commitments towards sustainable development”[7] to Seoul’s 2005 Clean Air Act that succeeded in improving South Korea’s public health conditions by lessening the quantity of atmospheric pollutants[8] as well as Beijing’s 2013 Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan that advocated a decrease of fossil fuels like coal and an increase of alternative power sources in China’s total energy usage,[9] many policy regulations have been proven productive in lessening the repercussions of air pollution on society. Nevertheless, policymakers should take further actions to assist East Asia in overcoming this “inevitable pain” of economic development. Because of material conditions constraints, a large proportion of existing air pollution reduction measures depend on the adjustment of governance systems to minimize the negative externalities of pollutant emissions. Given the evident inadequacy of adaptive strategies for eradicating environmental problems, East Asian policymakers should overhaul their current agendas of pollution treatment by putting an equal value on technology innovations. This would ease the transition from traditional fossil fuels to alternative energy sources. Besides, the current bilateral and temporary mechanisms for international pollution control have excluded certain key stakeholders, such as Mongolia in the sandstorm issue, from participating in collective environmental management.[10] Therefore, East Asian countries must collaborate to establish an inclusive, standing governing body independent of political prejudice to address transboundary environmental concerns.
Beyond promoting technological progress and multilateralism, policymakers of the three East Asian powerhouses should take the lead in developing a modernization-based pollution treatment network through globalization. According to Walt Whitman Rostow’s modernization theory, a society must move through five stages to convert itself from the traditional, rural form to a system of high mass consumption.[11] While South Korea and Japan are advancing toward the highest stage of modernization, China, the world’s largest developing country, has borne a sizable share of its two neighbors’ environmental costs of industrialization by absorbing many of their pollution-inducing activities. In that case, it stands to reason that South Korea and Japan should share the necessary expenses of reducing air pollution in China through the dispersal of pollution-inducing production under “multinational cooperation programs” for sustainability and fairness.[12] With these treatment measures, East Asia will be able to lower their air pollutant levels by a large margin in the upcoming decades. The region’s successful treatment of air pollution issues can also set an exemplar of environmental management for other places of the world experiencing rapid economic growth and industrial upgrading.
[1] Lihong Ren, Wen Yang, and Zhipeng Bai, “Characteristics of Major Air Pollutants in China,” Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, 2017, 8.
[2] B. S. Min, “Regional Cooperation for Control of Transboundary Air Pollution in East Asia,” Journal of Asian Economics 12, no. 1 (2001): 141.
[3] OECD, The Economic Consequences of Outdoor Air Pollution (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2016), 12.
[4] Qiyuan Wang et al., “Real-Time Characterization of Aerosol Particle Composition During Winter High-Pollution Events in China,” Air Pollution in Eastern Asia: An Integrated Perspective, 2017, 225.
[5] Anna Fifield and Yoonjung Seo, “Smog Becomes a Political Issue in South Korean Election,” The Washington Post (WP Company, April 27, 2017), https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/smog-becomes-a-political-issue-in-south-korean-election/2017/04/27/afd55dba-1a2d-11e7-8598-9a99da559f9e_story.html.
[6] Matthew A. Shapiro and Toby Bolsen, “Korean Perceptions of Transboundary Air Pollution and Domestic Coal Development: Two Framing Experiments,” Energy Policy 126 (2019): 333.
[7] Ichiro Sumikura and Derek Osborn, “A Brief History of Japanese Environmental Administration: A Qualified Success Story?,” Journal of Environmental Law 10, no. 2 (1998): 250.
[8] Soohyung Lee, Heesun Yoo, and Minhyuk Nam, “Impact of the Clean Air Act on Air Pollution and Infant Health: Evidence from South Korea,” Economics Letters 168 (2018): 101.
[9] Cunrui Huang et al., “Air Pollution Prevention and Control Policy in China,” Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, 2017, 248.
[10] Min, “Regional Cooperation for Control,” Journal of Asian Economics, 142.
[11] Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 4.
[12] Euijune Kim, Seung-Woon Moon, and Shigemi Kagawa, “Spatial Economic Linkages of Economic Growth and Air Pollution: Developing an Air Pollution-Multinational CGE Model of China, Japan, and Korea,” The Annals of Regional Science 63, no. 2 (2019): 266.
Yuchen Ge (yuchen.ge@tufts.edu) is a senior at Tufts University studying International Relations and Economics and minoring in Latin American Studies.
