Major Environmental Concerns  

[ Land | Forest | Biodiversity | Water | Marine & Coastal Environments | Urban & Industrial Environments ]

Underlying Causes

[ Social | Economic | Institutional | Environmental ]

In this region, Government responsibility for the environment rests with environment ministries, with a division or unit in another ministry, with independent environment agencies, or with departments created to assist the environment ministries. Most of the environment institutions in developing countries are relatively small and far from satisfactory in terms of staffing and financial resources. Command and control is the main environmental policy instrument in the region. Strategic environmental planning, legislative means, and regulatory standards and planning procedures are the most commonly used tools of environmental control. The least used instruments are those related to economic incentives.

A common problem is that environmental institutions have no power to audit the environmental performance of sectoral institutions. Thus, they are attempting to strengthen performance through improvement of existing tools or by developing additional tools for use by other institutions. Two major shortcomings with regard to the greening of industry and business in the region are weak monitoring and enforcement capabilities of environment institutions and the lack of green consumerism.

Moderate progress was made during the last five years on the effective implementation of the environmental impact assessment process. The overall quality of EIAs in the region suggests a need for more legislation, regulations, and guidelines. There is also an urgent need to create Government environment management units that can enforce the EIA's procedure. In addition, the federal system of some Governments makes it difficult to enforce EIAs for activities related to resource exploitation because these are usually under the jurisdiction of a provincial Government.

Institution-strengthening measures (which include training of key professionals, especially engineers and economists, on EIA techniques) are needed to make the EIA procedure a more effective instrument for sustainable development in the region. For example, in India there was an initiative to develop responsibility for EIA in the State Governments, but most projects are now once again under the responsibility of a unit in the Ministry of Environment and Forests because many States lacked the institutional capacity to handle EIAs of large and complex projects (ESCAP, 1995a).

Similarly, using risk assessment in developing countries entails many problems, including the lack of trained personal and comprehensive databases-whether industrial, medical, or environmental.

United Nations Environment Programme