Asia faces huge environmental costs due to lack of investment in sanitation, ADB says

MANILA (AP) - Asia is faced with a huge bill to clean up its polluted rivers and groundwater because it has not invested enough in infrastructure for disposing pollutants, the Asian Development Bank said Tuesday.

In Shanghai, for example, Chinese authorities had to spend US$1 billion to clean the Suzhou Creek, which runs through the metropolis and used to be a health risk to residents.

Chinese officials acknowledged the cleanup costs were many times higher than the cost of preventing the pollution, the bank said.

"Failure to act on sanitation and wastewater eventually comes home to roost when the problem results in a smelly, foul, turgid river that despoils a city and surrounding areas," said Amy Leung, the ADB's urban development specialist.

"But the real horror is the outbreak of typhoid and cholera caused by inadequate sanitation," she said in a statement.

About 2 billion Asians _ roughly 66 percent of the region's total population _ lack access to adequate sanitation, such as toilets, pit latrines, septic tanks, and sewage systems, the bank said. They account for nearly three-quarters of people worldwide without such facilities.

Adverse health effects not only hit the poor the hardest, but damage entire economies with increased strain on health systems, decline in tourism income, and loss of productivity, the Manila-based lending institution said.

India, for example, is estimated to lose more than US$230 million each year in tourism revenue because of perceptions of poor sanitation.

China last year announced plans to invest US$125 billion in sanitation and wastewater treatment, a major step forward but still inadequate for its needs, the ADB said.

China's investment indicates the magnitude of funds needed in Asia for sanitation and wastewater infrastructure until 2015.

The bank said it has about US$1.6 billion in the pipeline for investment in sanitation between now and 2010 and is looking for ways to double or triple that figure.

It also has dedicated an extra US$20 million in grants to help governments and utilities improve their sanitation programs.

ADB experts were set to discuss the challenges at the World Water Week, a global conference on sanitation and other water issues in Stockholm on Aug. 12-18.