Urban sprawl is the main challenge facing next week's Bali summit, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, in Shenzhen.
Ten years after it was handed over by the British, Hong Kong is still separated from mainland China by a high fence topped with razor wire along the southern side of the Shenzhen River, and crossing this formidable frontier at Lo Wu railway station is reminiscent of going through Bahnhof Friederichstrasse before the Berlin Wall fell.
The border fence keeps out thousands of Chinese who might otherwise flood into the relatively rich former British colony, but it can do nothing to stop the pollution from tens of thousands of factories in Guangdong province and the coal-fired power plants that supply them with electricity. Air pollution doesn't recognise any boundaries.
Over the past 20 years, the Pearl River delta has become "the factory of the world", accounting for a third of China's exports. Since Shenzhen was designated as the country's first "special economic zone" in 1980, its population has exploded to nearly 9 million - exceeding Hong Kong's 7 million - while Guangzhou, further up the delta, has 10 million.
Many of the factories in the delta are owned by Hong Kong entrepreneurs who relocated their operations across the border to avail of cheaper labour and evade tighter environmental controls. That's why Civic Exchange, the leading Hong Kong-based public policy think tank, argues that they have a moral responsibility to clean up their act.
"People are dying here because of air pollution," says Michelle Weldon, the group's environmental officer. There are four premature deaths per day, or 1,460 per year, mainly due to microscopic dust (PM10) in the air. "To put that in perspective, it's a lot more than the total of 298 deaths recorded from Sars [ severe acute respiratory syndrome] in 2003."
According to Civic Exchange's recent report, Still Holding Our Breath, "the danger Hong Kong faces today is the attitude of denial of those at the highest level of government to the severity of the problem," and it blames this on "a political tradition of putting the interests of trade and industry groups above the interests of the general public".
In terms of tonnage, 80 per cent of the pollution in Hong Kong from sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxides, PM10 and volatile organic compounds comes from the Pearl River delta. But there's also local pollution at street level from the canyon effect of so many tall buildings as well as from marine sources, given that it's one of the world's busiest ports.
Dubliner Bill Condon, a business consultant who has been living in Hong Kong for seven years, remembers that he used to count the number of hazy days in a month when smog enveloped the city, much like Los Angeles in the 1970s.
"Now it's so bad that I find myself counting the number of clear days. Sometimes I can't even see the other end of the bridge."
Hong Kong still dazzles at night, when most of its skyscrapers are lit up to create one of the greatest shows on earth. And in fairness, as Civic Exchange acknowledges, the government of this "special administrative region" of China has made some progress in cutting pollution by - for example - encouraging all the taxis to switch from diesel to LPG.
However, in common with many Chinese and other Asian cities, air quality is not being treated primarily as a public health issue. The most recent World Health Organisation guidelines (2005) have not been widely adopted, which is one of the reasons Beijing is facing an air pollution nightmare as it prepares to stage the Olympic Games next August.
The number of vehicles in the Chinese capital has been increasing at a rate of 15 per cent per year, clogging streets once full of bicycles with motorised traffic and magnifying the city's air pollution burden. So it's no wonder that the authorities have been giving serious consideration to the extreme option of banning traffic for the duration of the games.
The Olympics will come and go, but it's what happens in the longer term in Beijing and other mega-cities that will ultimately determine whether the world will win the battle against climate change. And with more than half the planet's population now living in cities for the first time in human history, achieving urban sustainability is the most challenging task we face.
That was the theme of an Asia Europe Environment Forum held in Shenzhen this week. One of the central issues discussed by a disparate group from more than 20 countries was how the exponential growth of cities could be decoupled from environmental degradation that's way in excess of the carrying capacity of the planet, now and in the future.
ENTER RICHARD BARRETT, chairman of Treasury Holdings China, with its vision of Dongtan "eco-city" for Chongming Island, at the mouth of the Yangtze River, north of Shanghai. To be developed in partnership with Shanghai Industrial Investment Holdings, it will provide sustainable homes, workplaces and leisure facilities for 80,000 people.
Designers Arup say Dongtan will produce its own energy from wind, solar, bio-fuel and recycled municipal waste, while clean technologies will power public transport, supplemented by a network of cycle- and footpaths to make the city as "carbon neutral" as possible.
Barrett told the forum that Dongtan would be one of the flagship projects for the Shanghai Expo in 2010, which will have as its theme "Chinese Wisdom in Urban Development". Whatever about that, he believed that Dongtan would offer "an answer, a prototype for other cities" that were serious about reducing their carbon emissions. Although the project has been delayed and its first phase won't be complete until 2010, Dongtan is already being featured among the "10 new wonders" of China, along with Beijing's Olympic stadium, its new international airport, national theatre and Central Chinese TV complex and the 101-storey Shanghai World Financial Centre.
Any notion that Europe could lecture Asia on sustainable urban development was dispelled by Ronan Uhel, of the European Environment Agency. As his meticulous analysis of urban sprawl in Europe found, an area equivalent to five times the size of Greater London had been colonised for urban development between 1990 and 2000.
"Four-fifths of the Rhine river's floodplain has been consumed by urban development, so it's no surprise that there is flooding in these areas. We don't have a spatial development vision in Europe - can you believe it?" he exclaims. "What we have is market-driven development led by engineers and road construction" - often EU-funded.
GOOD THINGS ARE happening, however, The French Development Agency is working on a sustainable masterplan for Guiyang City, capital of China's Guizhou province, with support from the World Bank. And one of its key objectives is to reduce the carbon footprint of this growing city of 3.5 million people in the longer term.
The Clean Air Initiative for Asian Cities, part- funded by the World Bank and the US Energy Foundation, is working with 10 major Chinese cities to improve air quality management. "We're not about reinventing the wheel," says Yan Peng, its coordinator. "It's about basic stuff, such as how to identify the sources of pollution in these cities."
Shaming campaigns have also worked. In Delhi, for example, a citizens' legal action in 1998 led the Supreme Court of India to order that the city's bus fleet must be converted to run on compressed natural gas (CNG) rather than on polluting diesel fuel. Implementation of the court's order resulted in a measurable improvement in air quality.
Like China, India is urbanising at an extraordinary rate. As Delhi-based researcher Akshima Dogra told the forum, the number of cities with a population of one million or more rose from 12 to 35 in the 20 years to 2001. More alarmingly, over the same period, the number of vehicles in India grew four times faster than the country's population.
In Delhi alone, nearly 1,000 new vehicles per day are being added to the roads, threatening to set aside the gains made by converting its buses to CNG and investing more than €1.5 billion in a metro that carries 500,000 passengers a day. Environmentalists fear the city could even revert to having one of the most toxic atmospheres in the world.
What's happening on the ground in cities as diverse as Delhi and Shenzhen forms a very real backdrop to the UN Climate Change Summit, starting next week on the Indonesian island of Bali. Cutting air pollution would not only bring health benefits for their inhabitants, but would reduce greenhouse gas emissions - a "win-win" for them, and for the world.