RANGOON
— Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu
Kyi on Sunday launched an historic and in-depth look at the tropics, making
public an unprecedented three-year evaluation of the social, economic and
environmental issues at play in the 134 countries that straddle the equator.
The
State of the Tropics report offers information on a vast array of factors
affecting a region that by 2050 will be home to 67 percent of the global
population under 15 years of age, from the tropics’ biodiversity and crime
rates to governance and gender equality.
Burma
is spotlighted as “among the world’s ‘hottest hotspots’ for species diversity”
across some of Asia’s last intact—but increasingly threatened—forests. The
tropics as a whole are home to 80 percent of global biodiversity.
The
report paints a picture of the tropics as a region improved in most
socioeconomic indicators since 1980. Overall poverty is down, agricultural
productivity has risen and inhabitants of the tropics increasingly enjoy the
benefits of access to mobile phones and the Internet.
But
many problems persist and some have become more acute since 1980, according to
the report. Fish stocks in the tropics are rapidly being exhausted and rising
emissions from industrialization are contributing to a worldwide rise in the
greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. In many development
indicators, tropical countries notably lag nations outside of the belt that
spans the latitudinal lines known as the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
Though only 40 percent of the world’s population lives in the tropics, the
region is home to two-thirds of the world’s extremely impoverished.
The
462-page analysis, which Suu Kyi called “a most impressive and overwhelming
report on our part of the world,” was the product of collaboration among 12
universities and research institutions specializing in the tropics.
“I
would like to ask a very simple question of those who have put together this
report, and all those who make use of this report: How is the information that
has been made available to us going to help us to enhance the lives of the
peoples of this globe,” Suu Kyi said in her keynote address at the launch event
in Rangoon.
Though
Burma’s geographic range includes a “dry zone” that sees limited annual
rainfall and snow-capped mountains in northern Kachin State, more than 90
percent of the population lives in the tropics.
The
report makes note of the unique challenges presented to Burma’s forests in
light of major political and economic reforms introduced by President Thein
Sein over the last three years. Reforms that have offered opportunities for
conservation via international engagement with the country, the report said, but
have also hastened deforestation as foreign investment pours into the once
closed country.
At
particular risk are Burma’s mangrove forests, which are spread across more than
1,200 miles of coastline from the Bay of Bengal to the Andaman Sea, and inland waterways
such as the Irrawaddy Delta.
“The
mangrove forests of the Ayeryarwady Delta have experienced the highest rate of
deforestation in the country with an estimated loss in area of 64% between 1978
and 2011. … At current rates they could be lost entirely in the next two
decades,” the report said, adding that the trees were often victims of
agricultural conversion encouraged by government policy.
The
prospect of mangroves’ extinction has implications for more than just the
country’s biodiversity. Mangroves are recognized for the valuable protection
they provide to coastal lands and their inhabitants, with some researchers
claiming that if the nation’s mangrove forests had been less degraded when
Cyclone Nargis devastated the delta region in 2008, fewer casualties and damage
would have resulted as the storm made landfall.
“The
unprecedented and profound social, political and economic changes that are
rapidly taking place in Burma/Myanmar are likely to determine the future of one
of the most important and intact forest regions in the Tropics,” the report
concluded.
Also
analyzed in the report were the challenges presented by tropical diseases such
as malaria and dengue fever, both of which continue to burden the health
systems of Burma and the wider Southeast Asian region. In 2010, Southeast Asia
was second only to the Caribbean in dengue incidence rates, and a 2013 report
from the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned of a growing
strain of drug resistant malaria in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Burma.
Burma accounts for about 50 percent of malaria-related deaths in Southeast
Asia.
Nonetheless,
the Southeast Asian region as a whole was deemed one of the tropics’ success
stories, boasting some of the highest growth rates in the world from 1980-2010.
Over that period, life expectancy rose by 26 years, and nearly 175 million
fewer people were living in poverty by 2010.
With
the economic growth, however, have come new challenges, including rising carbon
dioxide emissions, higher pollution discharge into rivers and streams, and land
conflicts resulting from conversion of forests to farmland.
Suu
Kyi, who said that she could add little of substance to the exhaustive report,
called for the information contained in the document to be used to inspire “a
more caring world.”
“And
there is so much that we can learn from this report, to make us better carers,”
she said. “To care for our environment, to care for one another, to care for
those who are different from us.”
Professor
Sandra Harding, vice chancellor and president of James Cook University, one of
the institutions that contributed to the report, said the tropics—which are
expanding by 138-277 kilometers every 25 years as global temperatures rise—was
a region that “features some of the most pressing issues of our time.”
“The
aim of the report is to answer a very simple question: Is life in the tropics
getting better? More subtly, the aim of the report is geopolitical,” she said
in introductory remarks on Sunday. “It is to change the way the world views
itself.”
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