The East is turning green

Not long ago, many Asian nations prioritised the sheer speed of economic expansion over the quality of growth. Now, policymakers in China and India have recognised that low-carbon technologies are part and parcel of their ambitions to achieve sustainable expansion. 
China’s five-year economic plan includes ambitious goals to lower carbon intensity and improve water efficiency, for example. 
Plans to build more than 100 coal-fired power stations have been cancelled. A carbon emissions trading scheme is due to be launched later this year. 
Green bond issuance, as a means to financing environmentally-friendly projects, is picking up.
In India, its renewable energy programme has accelerated rapidly. 
The country is planning to install 225 gigawatts of renewables by 2022, putting it on course for green energy to account for as much as 57 per cent of electricity capacity by 2027. 
Both India and China are making big efforts to promote electric or new-energy vehicles. 
And research released in May showed that both countries are set to exceed the targets they set for themselves under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. 
Some of this strikes a chord in Thailand. 
Authorities have geared up efforts to promote high-end technologies to drive the economy forward. 
Electric vehicles are among the industries the government has vowed to support, via measures such as tax holidays of five to eight years for local production. 
True, the challenges of these countries’ green transitions should not be underestimated. 
It will take years to replace or upgrade the often polluting and inefficient economic activity that was built up during the headlong rush for growth over the past decades. 
But India and China’s green efforts are anchored in both environmental and economic considerations.
On the environmental front, pollution, more extreme weather conditions, droughts and rising sea levels have become increasingly hard to ignore – as Thailand knows all too well. And on the business side, technological advances have sharply reduced the cost of low-carbon alternatives. 
It increasingly now makes not just ethical, but also commercial sense to build wind farms, or to deploy electrically-powered buses on public transport routes.
Perhaps most crucially, the adoption of green technologies is also about facilitating China and India’s ambitions to take their economies up the value chain, and to increase the productivity of workers and companies.
Promoting smarter logistics, less wasteful electricity generation, cutting-edge wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and modern building and waste-management systems – all this goes hand-in-glove with these goals. 
In other words, the “greening” of their economies, far from being a burdensome must-do, actually supports this shift. 
It also means attractive jobs, and business opportunities for local and foreign companies.
Last but not least, millions of people are moving into cities every year as China, India, Thailand and other nations continue to urbanise. 
Lower-emissions infrastructure and energy-efficient buildings are key to managing this process in an environmentally smart way, and avoiding urban gridlock. 
All this is a mindset change that will take years to filter through to all levels of society. But it is producing change at a far faster pace than many observers had dared to hope for just a few years ago. 
Given the threat posed by climate change, that’s worth celebrating.

Contributed by HELEN WONG, CEO of Greater China at Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.