Paradise can’t wait

WE must develop the tropics, but the challenges are formidable.

State of the Tropics

WHETHER it was Aristotle or someone else who first described the tropics as torrid, the thinking certainly stuck. Despite fascinating scientists, artists and explorers for generations, much of the region’s dense jungle, broiling desert and endless savanna remains largely untouched.

In 1910, a parliamentarian said Australia’s first medical institute would “establish whether civilised man could live in the tropics without succumbing to moral degeneracy”. Aristotle thought the “torrid zone” either side of the Equator uninhabitable. Thankfully, history proved him wrong.

About 40 per cent of the world’s population lives in the tropics, and more than 50 per cent of all children under five. By the middle of this century, those figures will have risen to about 50 per cent and 60 per cent respectively. The region remains comparatively disadvantaged.

Projecting the Tropics: population growth 2010-2050

Popular images of tropical countries often feature aquamarine seas and exotic wildlife: holiday destinations rather than everyday living environments.

But just as the word torrid can mean full of passion or difficulty, so those paradisiacal beaches and ripe forests are occasionally overcome by the vigorous tropical climate, and their people subjected to immense hardship.

Difficulty transferring technology between climatic zones is one factor that has retarded development throughout the region. These challenges will have to be overcome if the tropics are to continue growing and accumulating wealth, helping to raise living standards globally.

This, of course, is the great hope behind long-held dreams of developing Australia’s north, the hope that economic expansion above the Tropic of Capricorn can compensate in some way for the loss of manufacturing industries and economic stagnation down south.

In 2011, a group of tropical research institutions met in Singapore. Quickly they realised the world had been viewed primarily as a set of land masses — Asia, the Americas, Europe and Africa — so long that they could not answer one simple question: was life in the tropics getting any better?

With that, State of the Tropics was born. Launched by Myanmar’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon yesterday, the 450-page report aims to answer the question.

Under the guidance of Australia’s James Cook University, a dozen research institutions worked to recompile data from a range of sources around Aristotle’s conception of the world as climatic zones.

“Now we are turning our eyes north, we must look north not just to Asia but right around the tropics,” says Sandra Harding, JCU’s vice-chancellor. “Australia has a role to play as the largest developed landmass in the tropics.”

Harding says reprising Aris­totle’s idea will help Australia in particular overcome its fear of the “mongrel north”. Where better to look for a solution than from those with the same problem? Where better to look for opportunity, too?

“The reality of world development is an Asian reality, but it’s a tropical reality, too,” Harding says. “Countries in the region are more likely to have pragmatic solutions for problems experienced elsewhere in the tropics, where similar environmental and other conditions prevail.”

Some of the report’s findings are startling. After lagging behind for generations, the tropics actually grew faster than the rest of the world economically during the three decades to 2010. Tropical economic activity reached 18.7 per cent of the global total in 2010, up from 14.5 per cent in 1980.

GDP per capita in tropical countries

In an essay contained in the report, former head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Dennis Trewin, highlights how significant this change is.

Trewin revisits a landmark study by US economist Jeffrey Sachs, entitled Tropical Underdevelopment, in which Sachs sought to explain why income per head in the tropics, which was more than two-thirds of that in temperate zones in 1820, had fallen to just one-quarter by the early 1990s. As economies in places such as Europe and North America grew, the tropical ones couldn’t keep up. Sachs wondered why.

Using data from the State of the Tropics study, Trewin shows tropical countries more recently have not just picked up the pace but overtaken the rest of the world in terms of average annual growth.

This matters, because even though economic growth puts pressure on the environment, it increases the resilience of tropical populations to natural disasters and climate change — two challenges the report clearly identifies. Trewin attributes this reversal of fortunes to improvements in health, education, innovation and governance, things Sachs said were needed.

“The large increase in tertiary enrolments suggests that there is growing capacity within the tropical regions to adopt new technologies,” Trewin writes.

“Other indicators suggest important increases in home-grown technical capability.”

The report finds ecosystems in the tropics — which contains about 80 per cent of terrestrial biodiversity and more than 95 per cent of coral reef and mangrove biodiversity — are in much better shape than those elsewhere.

Even though CO2 emissions are rising in the tropics, as in the rest of the world, air quality is broadly improving.

The report contains warnings about land and water, with nearly one-third of all tropical land degraded in some way during the past three decades.

Deforestation and poor agriculture have been particularly damaging. The total amount of land used for agriculture in the tropics barely changed in that period, but livestock production rose by 90 per cent and cer­eal production more than doubled, marking a win for innovation.

The tropics have more than half the world’s renewable water resources, but almost half the region’s population is vulnerable to water stress. Many regions, including Australia, are looking to improve irrigation. Tropical rivers are generally less polluted than those elsewhere, but there is wide variation.

The amount of marine fish caught in the past 60 years has increased in line with population and income growth. Tropical fisheries are now at risk of becoming over-exploited. Poor management and overfishing worldwide is estimated to cost $53 billion annually.

Despite these growing environmental pressures, poverty declined in recent decades — by almost 50 per cent globally since the early 1980s. In absolute terms, living standards in the tropics remain well below those in more temperate parts of the world such as Europe and North America. But the tropics are starting to catch up, in large part thanks to improvements in health, education and employment. Refugee numbers have also declined.

In general, the report finds life in the tropics improved commensurate with economic development, although at some cost to the environment. Most of the gains have been in Asia and, more recently, South America and southern Africa. Australia is part of the slowest growing region of Oceania. The most troubled area is sub-Saharan Africa.

In a last-minute addition, the study now includes an essay showing expansion of the tropical zone because of climate change is slower than previously thought. The finding could be controversial. Joanne Isaac, a JCU researcher with expertise in brushtail possums, and Steve Turton, a professor of geography, explain that estimates changed as the quality of modelling improved.

“In 2009, the tropics were estimated to be expanding by between 222km and 533km per 25 years,” Isaac says. “In the five years since that report, an estimate from more than 30 studies now puts the rate of tropical expansion somewhere between 138km and 277km per 25 years.” Isaac argues the expansion remains significant.

“Subtropical arid conditions may eventually be experienced in regions at higher latitudes that have historically enjoyed a more temperate climate, such as Perth,” she says. “This has implications for management of water resources and agricultural systems.

“However, some regions which currently border the equatorial zone may experience an increase in extreme rainfall, which could result in flooding, the displacement of communities and increased incidence of disease.”

In a separate essay, Richard Corlett, a professor of ecology based at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, points out that while climate change is worrying, most predictions of how it will affect the tropics are based on evidence gathered outside the zone, and therefore uncertain.

So what is in this report for Australia? Earlier this month, Harding was appointed to a new federal Northern Australia Advisory Group headed by former Northern Territory chief minister and development enthusiast Shane Stone. Announcing the appointments, Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss talked up a northern vision embracing agriculture, cattle production, energy generation, tourism growth, education and health service expansion as part of the government’s national plan for economic recovery. Labor, too, has declared itself a party of enthusiasts.

Looking along the equatorial zone, it becomes clear that there is much those living in tropical countries can learn from each other, and more to do. Just as many countries that invested in infrastructure and fostered export-led growth are now thriving, so too northern Australia hopes to capture some of that potential. While many of Australia’s tropical neighbours are grappling with the challenges of development, northern parts of this country are also struggling to achieve standards of health, education, employment and governance taken for granted in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne. Some of those neighbours arguably have too many people. One of northern Australia’s challenges is underpopulation.

Australia is already developed, with large knowledge-based and service economies. Many other countries need that kind of help. Technology adapted for Australia’s broad range of climates can surely be exported. For many Asian countries, the challenge this century is how to cope with rapid urbanisation. For Australia it remains how to overcome distance. In both cases the keywords are sustainable development.

“State of the Tropics provides a base camp for the long but increasingly achievable climb to a more prosperous global future,” Harding says.

As the wet season builds, great clouds atop each other reach far above the horizon. With studies such as this, no one can say there is a lack of ambition.