ENVIRONMENT: Tighter Emission Norms Help Asians Breathe Easier

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Apr 2 2004 (IPS) - Asia is becoming a victim of its own rapid and uncontrolled development, say leading vehicular emission experts who gathered here this week to discuss strategies on how the region’s more than 2.5 billion people can breathe easier. If there was one issue that delegates at the Mar. 30 – Apr. 1 conference, ‘The Leapfrog Factor: Towards Clean Air in Asian Cities’ concurred on, it was the need for tighter and faster regulations that could stem a situation already dangerous for human health.

Fu Lixin, director of the Air Pollution Research Institute at Tsinghua University in China, said a balance had to be found between maintaining production levels of affordable vehicles and safeguarding human health. ”But we need to find proactive approaches,” he said.

Others said the way forward was by adopting cleaner fuels. Kong Ha from the Motor Vehicles Emissions Department in Hong Kong pointed to successes the territory has had in using Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG).

Supat Wangwongwatana, deputy director general of Thailand’s pollution control department, reported that his country took a three-pronged approach to control noxious emissions from motorcycles: technology to reduce white-smoke emission, stringent emission standards and a credible inspection and maintenance programme.

Thailand’s measures have had a tremendous impact: the sale of two-stroke motorcycles that burn lubricants with fuel nosedived from 54 percent in 1999 to about two percent in 2003. The on-road share of these ‘toxic wheels’ has come down to 40 percent in March this year.

Two-stroke engines have also banned in Dhaka. S M A Bari, a director in the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority, said the government had found enormous public support for the measure, especially since there has been a visible difference in air quality since 2002 when the phaseout programme began.

”We have now undertaken important initiatives to promote the use of compressed natural gas (CNG),” Bari said.

Regulatory and fiscal incentives helped Mary Jane Ortega, mayor of San Fernando city in the Philippines, to encourage conversion of two-stroke tricycles to cleaner four-stroke technology. Ortega said, however, that care had been taken to make the phaseout a gradual one so that it would not hurt operators. ”But all two-stroke tricycles will be gone by the end of 2004,” she said.

But nowhere has enforcement been so successful as in India’s capital Delhi, where the Supreme Court stepped in decisively while politicians waffled over what the judges saw as a public health issue rather than one of technology or economics.

The apex court ensured that Delhi state phased out not only two-stroke engines but also the use diesel for buses, taxis and other public transport in the teeth of stiff opposition from manufacturers, fleet owners and even scientists who argued for a ‘mix of fuels and technology.’

Delhi’s Chief Minister Sheila Dixit, who was present at the conference, said that clean air was a major factor in the re-election of her provincial government by a grateful public last year.

The apex court’s sense of urgency and wisdom was brought out in presentations of studies made by Twisha Lahiri, who heads the department of neurobiology at the Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute in the eastern city of Kolkata.

Lahiri’s studies were carried out on 1,600 non-smoking adults from Delhi and Kolkata against a control group from the relatively pollution-free Sunderbans Islands in West Bengal state, and on 6,200 schoolchildren from the two metropolises against those in rural areas.

Upper respiratory symptoms like the common cold, running or stuffy nose, sinusitis and sore throat were present in 58 percent of adults examined in Delhi and 74 percent in Kolkata, compared to 34 percent in the control groups. Seventy percent of children tested in Kolkata and 68 percent of children from Delhi had upper respiratory symptoms, compared to 41 percent in the controls form rural areas.

Similarly lower respiratory symptoms including dry cough, wheeze and chest discomfort were prevalent in 60 percent of subjects in Delhi and 68 percent in Kolkata in contrast to 31 percent in the control group. Lung function was impaired in 46 percent of adults in Delhi and 56 percent in Kolkata against 21 percent in the control group.

”Air pollution-related health problems were not restricted to the lung, because we also recorded systemic changes like altered immunity, haematological abnormalities, impaired liver function, genetic changes and neurobehavioural problems in several urban subjects,” Lahiri told her international audience.

According to John Rogers, an international expert on vehicular inspection and maintenance based in Mexico, the most pressing problem in Asian cities is particulate emission from diesel vehicles.

”Contribution to particulate pollution by diesel vehicles is far more than the number of vehicles indicate and calls for immediate introduction of effective inspection and maintenance programmes,” Rogers said.