SHANGHAI, May 8 (AFP) — Asia is teetering on the brink of an environmental catastrophe as the region’s cities mushroom, spewing out clouds of waste and sucking up scarce water resources, delegates at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) annual meeting warned Wednesday.

Pacific Rim countries must face up to challenges posed by sprawling metropolises if their citizens are to have clean water and breathable air in decades to come, the mayor of Honolulu in Hawaii, Jeremy Harris, told ADB members meeting in Shanghai.

“We must link environmental success with economic success,” said Harris, calling on authorities around the region to focus on sustainable development.

Water is becoming an increasingly precious commodity as the region’s rivers and estuaries fill with silt, he warned.

Asia’s rivers have 20 times recommended levels of solids suspended in their water, and consequently two thirds of the sediment choking the world’s oceans flows out of Asia’s rivers, killing off fish and destroying eco-systems.

“With 42 per cent of China’s population expected to be living in coastal cities by the year 2010, this is a problem we urgently need to address,” Harris said.

Poor communities around the Asia-Pacific region bear the brunt of the environmental degradation, with four to five million infants’ deaths resulting from air and water pollution every year, he noted.

One country where the extremes of weather are becoming ever greater is China, the north of which was wracked by the worst dust storms in a decade earlier this year, while the south is bracing for anticipated flooding.

Growing urbanisation in China has proved a headache for the country’s conservationists, but officials are doing their best to tackle the problem, said Xie Zhenhua, the country’s minister of state environmental protection.

“China is giving greater attention to the problem of environmental degradation,” he said.

Over the past 30 years the number of people living in China’s cities and towns has risen to 36 per cent of the population, from 17.9 per cent in 1972, and urban planners have struggled to keep infrastructure growth in pace with the rising population, he added.

In the past five years great strides have been made in moving heavily polluting industries out of the cities and into more remote areas by offering subsidised land prices, and a switch has been made to unleaded gas.

Large metropolises such as Shanghai are also switching their energy consumption to natural gas from coal, which contains higher levels of sulphur dioxide, he noted.

Though progress has been made, much remains to be done, and there will also be a stiff economic price for the environmental destruction, said United Nations Environment Commissioner Klaus Topfer.

“Cities may be today a part of the problem, but tomorrow … they must become part of the solution,” he said.

Topfer pointed to the economic costs of traffic gridlock and pollution haze in cities such as Jakata and Bangkok.

Since cities generate most of a nation’s wealth and generally contain its institutions of higher education, smog, filthy water and gridlocked roads will take their toll on rising incomes, he warned.

Around 3,000 delegates are attending the Manila-based ADB’s annual meeting in the eastern Chinese city this week.