Asia looks to innovation to achieve sustainability
Innovation in the fields of renewable
energy, food production, water conservation, education and health will be
crucial for the developing economies of Asia to meet the United Nations’
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The 17 SDGs, which will succeed the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that are slated to expire in 2015, are
aimed at fostering economic growth, environmental protection and ending poverty
by 2030.
“As economic growth rises in Asia,
more concentration is going into value addition and innovation is the principle
vehicle for that,” Director-General of the World Intellectual Property
Organisation (WIPO) Dr. Francis Gurry tells IPS.
The Asian Development Outlook
(ADO) Supplement, released late July, maintains the ADB’s April forecast of 6.2
per cent growth in 2014 and 6.4 per cent in 2015 for the region’s 45
developing economies.
“Clearly, there is a priority to make
innovation work for sustainable development in these economies,”
Gurry says.
Leading innovation performers in Asia
include Japan, South Korea and Singapore, with China rapidly climbing up.
Malaysia tops the middle-income countries’ category for
innovation performance.
Quotable quote: Indeed, renewable energy
is the Holy Grail in Asia and countries in the region will need to invest
significantly in renewable energy technologies to meet the urgency of the
climate change challenge
Amongst the other large Asian
countries, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam have the potential to move up
the ladder of innovation, according to the Global Innovation Index
(GII) 2014.
Co-author of the GII and executive
director of INSEAD Global Indices, Bruno Lanvin, says, “It is a good sign
that innovation is taking a front seat in the design and hopefully the
implementation of the SDGs.
“Many Asian countries have already
become surprising contenders, for instance, China has emerged as one of the
main innovators in sectors like drones, civil aviation, biotechnology and
telecommunications,” he tells IPS.
However, Lanvin warns that in these
countries with large populations, “if innovation doesn’t translate into
improving the lives of its people, it is failing somehow.”
Given the region’s dichotomies such as
rapid urbanisation with large rural agricultural populations and extreme
vulnerabilities to climate change with growing resource intensities, experts
say that innovation must occur right across the economy, if it is to meet
the SDGs.
For instance, slum populations in the
developing world mushroomed from 650 million in 1990 to 863 million in 2012.
More than half of these slum dwellers reside in Asia.
This situation is set to worsen, with
Asia home to 56 per cent of the world’s biggest cities, including seven of the
top 10 ‘megacities’, defined as urban centers with over 10
million residents.
“Our attention has to be on the
‘bottom of pyramid’ populations, both urban and rural, and innovations in
technology and systems design have to cater to that segment,” New Delhi-based
Zeenat Niazi, vice president of Development Alternatives Group and co-chair of
Climate Action Network South Asia (CANSA), tells IPS.
“The challenges will be to reach to
the geographically spread-out populations with informal and inconsistent income
streams; and attract the private sector to partner with governments and
community groups to invest in sustainable growth,” she added.
The Asian region is today fast
becoming the hot bed of innovation on and off the field. Lanvin
cites Tata’s Nano car in India as a good example of localized,
affordable innovation, which Asia is going to need.
In his opinion, in the next decade the
Nano will be regarded a success in terms of adapting manufactured equipment to
specific conditions and bringing down the cost of production.
But he says, “If you want to be a
successful innovator in the Asian region, you have to be a very large company
like Tata or Huawei. If Asian countries could give themselves the means to
allow successful small enterprises to bring innovation to the market, we would
see a lot of frugal, path breaking innovation, especially in the field of
renewable energy.”
Indeed, renewable energy is the Holy
Grail in Asia and countries in the region will need to invest significantly in
renewable energy technologies to meet the urgency of the climate change
challenge – for instance, Asia-Pacific countries absorbed 80 per cent of the
366 billion dollars in damages caused by climate change in 2011, and many
countries in the region are poised to absorb major food and energy shocks as a
result of extreme weather patterns in the coming decade.
A new analysis by the market
research company Frost & Sullivan entitled ‘Global Solar Power Markets’
estimates that the world solar photovoltaic (PV) market will be worth 137.02
billion dollars in 2020.
This year, global solar PV demand is
dominated by the Asia-Pacific, which will account for approximately 46 percent
of annual installed solar PV capacity. China, Japan, India and Australia will
continue to be the top four countries driving regional demand.
With panel prices coming down
drastically, Asian manufacturers are now looking at value chain integration and
technical efficiencies to differentiate their products from other suppliers in
the market, the analysis adds.
Increasing scarcity of water will also
drive innovation in sustainable irrigation, water filtration and water recycling techniques.
“In Asia and the Pacific, where almost
two billion people live on less than 2.50 dollars a day, innovation is
essential for identifying solutions to persistent development challenges,”
Caitlin Wiesen, manager of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP)
regional center in Bangkok, tells IPS.
To help countries achieve development
goals, the UNDP has put in place a system for rapid prototyping and testing of
potential solutions. Currently, it is testing 16 new ideas across Asia and the Pacific.
One such prototype is being tested in
Bhutan. Jigme Dorji, acting head of the Poverty and MDG Unit at UNDP-Bhutan, is
working with US-based Emerson College’s Engagement Lab, local techies and youth
leaders to generate the content and develop an outreach strategy to maximise
youth participation in a game that would engage all the stakeholders in a
constructive dialogue about youth unemployment.
“We will evaluate the results of these
prototypes and assist countries in turning the successful ones so they can
achieve impact at scale,” Wiesen adds.
China, Vietnam, India, Malaysia and
Thailand, are demonstrating rising levels of innovation because of improvements
in institutional frameworks, a skilled labour force with expanded tertiary
education, better innovation infrastructure, a deeper integration with global
credit investment and trade markets, and a sophisticated business community –
even though progress on these dimensions is not uniform across their economies,
according to the GII report.
Many successful Asians, working as
entrepreneurs with major global corporations and universities, are beginning to
return to their home countries to nurture the next wave of innovations and
create local jobs.
Adam Bumpus, assistant professor of
Environment, Innovation and Development at the University of Melbourne, says,
“There are a number of initiatives that are directly contributing to SDGs by
increasingly linking countries in research and technology development. For
example, the University of Melbourne is working on initiatives that link
Australia, China, India and the US on innovation and climate change.”
“Secondly, there are opportunities to
piggyback sustainable development initiatives by using existing
technology in new innovative ways. In the Pacific we have been looking at the
role of mobile phones for sustainable development priorities like climate
change,” Bumpus tells IPS. (Source: www.eco-business.com/Photo courtesy
by: Writework.com)
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