Introduction: International Environmental Cooperation in Pacific Asia

　

Paul G. Harris

　

Abstract

　

        The world is experiencing profound environmental changes and increasing scarcities of natural resources. These problems, ranging from local ones such as water pollution and urban smog, to global ones like stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change, are often difficult to understand and even more difficult to solve. Pacific Asia is one region that is bearing the brunt of many of these environmental problems, and the countries there are also sources of many environmental problems affecting the rest of the world. About one-third of the world's people live in this region—many of them very poor—and the region's economies are developing in ways that are harmful to the natural environment. It is therefore important to understand why the environment is being harmed in this region, and how to limit and hopefully reverse that harm in the future. The goal of this book is to assist in developing and advancing that understanding. Toward that end, it seeks to share with readers findings of scholarly research on international environmental cooperation in Pacific Asia.

　

        Policymakers in Pacific Asia now realize that major efforts are required to address environmental decline, but their resources are often limited. International cooperation is crucial to stronger efforts to address these problems, especially when the problems have transboundary causes and consequences. There is now a large body of literature on international environmental cooperation (see below). It has helped scholars, policymakers and stakeholders understand the factors leading to the formation and implementation of international environmental institutions. However, the body of work focusing on Pacific Asia is rather small (especially in English), and we are only now beginning to comprehend the distinctive and idiosyncratic characteristics of this region that affect when and how states there choose to work together in combating environmental pollution and resource scarcities. By bringing under one cover some of the recent work examining international environmental cooperation in Pacific Asia, this book contributes to the research that is filling this gap in our knowledge.

　

        This book is divided into two sections. The first section examines many of the important issues, themes and actors that are important for our understanding of international environmental cooperation among the states of Pacific Asia and between regional actors and the rest of the world. It highlights such important themes as North-South cooperation, international justice and environmental security, and it illustrates key features of specific multilateral environmental agreements, major state actors, international organizations and financial institutions, multinational corporations, and nongovernmental organizations. The second section of this book looks more directly at international environmental cooperation, regime building and diplomacy in Pacific Asia, focusing on, among other issues, acid rain, nuclear waste, deforestation, and conflicts over regional seas. All of these themes, actors and issues—and many more examined in these chapters—are important for improving our understanding of environmental problems in Pacific Asia, and the essential means for dealing with them.

　

        The scholarly research described in this book bolsters the findings of other work in the area of international environmental cooperation. It also adds to those findings by, first, looking at several issues, themes and actors germane to environmental cooperation in Pacific Asia. We show how environmental changes in the region are increasingly perceived as threats to national security, but we also show that these changes cannot be adequately addressed until conceptions of environmental security are expanded to include social and economic issues. Furthermore, the participation of major powers from outside the region will be important for fostering the necessary international cooperation. We build on literature examining the links between trade and environment by showing that states in Pacific Asia are often opposed to incorporating environmental protection measures into trade accords. Even when they are willing to join global environmental agreements they must contend with their heavy reliance on global trade when implementing them. Economic issues, as well as environmental issues, are highly politicized in the region, not least in diplomatic exchanges between Pacific Asian countries, on one hand, and international financial institutions and donor states, on the other. We show that focusing on technical issues that avoid confronting political differences may have short-term benefits, but long-term environmental protection requires forthrightly addressing these differences as they exist between donor states and aid recipients in the region. This raises the important crosscutting issue of international justice. Developing countries in the region are unlikely to take all of the steps they must take to address environmental problems with global impacts if they do not feel that developed countries are treating them fairly. For their part, developed states, particularly those from outside Pacific Asia, must share more of the responsibility for addressing environmental problems that they have helped cause. Having said this, states in the region will inevitably bear the greatest burdens, and increasingly the environmental consequences of their own economic development may increase their responsibility for global environmental changes felt beyond Pacific Asia.

　

        Our second set of contributions to the literature deals with broad issues of diplomacy and regime building to achieve international cooperation on specific environmental issues in Pacific Asia. Northeast Asia is one part of the region where a substantial number of environmental institutions have been created through international cooperation, such as those intended to address regional acid rain. We find that making these institutions effective will require greater participation—and even leadership, insofar as possible—of civil society and international organizations (among other actors), and will require overcoming historical differences among the region's states. While these historical differences are unrelated to the region's environmental problems per se, they are so strong that they permeate environmental diplomacy. This is an important consideration that is given relatively little attention in existing literature. Unfortunately, regional environmental institutions are generally very weak. It is worth highlighting the region's political differences because, although many local environmental problems become "internationalized" and subjects of regional and global environmental diplomacy, these political differences and assumptions in the region can override the best intentions of regional and outside actors seeking to foster international environmental cooperation in Pacific Asia.

　

        To be sure, we have not analyzed all of the steps that are essential to reaching more effective international environmental cooperation in Pacific Asia. However, we have sought to highlight many of the problems and their key features, while suggesting some possible solutions, in order to assist policymakers and stakeholders in their efforts to address, through international cooperation, environmental changes in the region. This will benefit the billions of people in Pacific Asia—and indeed the billions more beyond—who will be increasingly affected by environmental changes there.