Urban Waste Management
The closure of existing open dumpsites and the introduction of sanitary landfill is an urgent priority everywhere in the developing world. Even where complementary disposal technologies such as composting or incineration (waste to energy plants) are practiced, a landfill is still required and is the backbone of any sustainable disposal system. Given the essential nature of the landfill for final disposal, and the lack of local experience and financial resources for introducing sanitary landfills, central government support in terms of technical assistance and access to financing is needed in many lower and middle income countries. Matching grants designed to encourage landfill investments and sustainable operations may be an appropriate instrument to consider, primarily because the environmental damages and benefits tend to spillover into neighboring municipalities and regions, or into underlying groundwater resources.
Climate Change and Air Pollution
Climate change and acidification are recognized as current or potential problems in both industrial and developing countries. Recently, a better understanding of how these two problems overlap and interact has emerged. First, greater combustion of fossil fuels increases the emissions of many acidifying pollutants as well as greenhouse gases. Second, changes in weather patterns stimulated by climate change will alter the intensity and distribution of acid deposition. Third and perhaps most important, because it complicates projections of climate change emissions of acidifying pollutants, especially sulphur dioxide, lead to the accumulation in the upper atmosphere of aerosols that partly mask the effects of greenhouse gases. The two important global issues addressed here climate change and acidification have the same underlying cause: a high level of economic activity that results in the emission of huge amounts of polluting substances into the atmosphere. Energy consumption in industrial regions has increased almost exponentially with the growth of population and economies.
Energy, Environment and Development
Energy is basic to development. They improve peoples’ productivity. In the aggregate, modern energy services are powerful engine of economic and social opportunity: no country has managed to develop much beyond a subsistence economy without ensuring at least minimum access to energy services for a broad section of its population. It is not surprising to find, therefore, that the billion who live in developing countries attach a high priority to energy services. On average, these people spend nearly 12% of their income on energy. More than five times the average for people living in OECD countries. As a "revealed preference", to use the economists’ jargon, energy services are high on the agenda of the world’s poorest people.
At the same time, the provision of energy services especially through the combustion of fossil fuels and biomass can create adverse environmental effects. In rich countries, much attention is directed to the regional and global consequences of fuel combustion, because many if the local effects have been controlled at considerable expense over the past half-century. In developing countries, the local environmental problems associated with energy use remain matters of concern that are as, or even more, urgent than they were in industrialized countries 50 or 100 years ago. Further, it is the poor who suffer most severely from such problems, because it is they who are forced to rely upon the most inefficient and polluting sources of energy services for lack of access to better alternatives.
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