January 1, 2022

On 1 January 2016, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) came into effect. High levels of transboundary atmospheric pollution pose a severe challenge towards meeting the SDGs. Given that the SDGs are evaluated on a regional scale, with Southeast Asia (SEA) forming one such region, regional cooperation is required. However, effective cooperation on environmental protection has so far been lacking, in part due to the marked differences between economic standing and the effectiveness of environmental regulations within SEA.

The possibility of a relationship between economic growth and environmental quality has long been discussed. Countries in early stages of development and experiencing high rates of economic growth are often also associated with high levels of economic degradation. The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) refers to the inverted U-shape relationship between indicators of environmental quality and economic growth.

In ‘Economic development and pollution emissions in Singapore: Evidence in support of the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis and its implications for regional sustainability’ (Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019), Dr Qinqin Chen (NTU School of Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Professor David Taylor (NUS Department of Geography) examine the extent to which the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality accords with that stipulated by the EKC. They conduct their research within the context of Singapore, the most economically developed country in SEA, using chromium (Cr), a heavy metal, as an indicator of environmental quality. As an important industrial raw material, chromium has a wide range of emission sources. Given that the risks of high levels of heavy metal towards public health are well known, the choice of heavy metal as a level of environmental quality would induce a more urgent response from legislators. Singapore has had eight sources of chromium, all originating from human activity. By 2017, only six of the original industries associated with chromium emissions remained in operation, with one of them on the decline.

In the early stages of development, economic development has a positive relationship with the depth of environmental impacts. This was reflected in Singapore, where during the post-independence period of industrialization from the 1960s to 1980s, the level of chromium emissions rose fourteenfold in a single decade.

However, with increasing wealth, environmental regulations are likely to be introduced, bringing about a decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation. In Singapore, by the end of the 1980s, atmospheric emissions had declined by 90% from their peak due to environmental regulations such as the 1971 Clean Air Act, which required all sources of atmospheric pollutants in Singapore to install pollution control devices.

As a result of these structural and attitudinal changes, environmentally damaging industries often end up relocating to less wealthy and more loosely regulated jurisdictions. This causes the environmental impacts of economic growth to be offshored, creating pollution havens in these areas. Although pollutive industries may become economically and environmentally non-viable in countries like Singapore, they remain dependent on products of those industries, leading to importation of these products from other countries in the region. This increases environmental degradation pressures in less economically developed countries with less stringent environmental regulations. Since economic modernization in the 1990s, chromium emissions in Singapore have remained relatively low and only marginally higher than levels pre-1960.

The relocation of pollutive industries has implications for environmental quality throughout the region. Though Singapore has more tightly enforced environmental regulations than Indonesia and Malaysia, it is still well within the range of their centres of industrialization, and is affected by transboundary pollution.

Read the article here.