Mira Kamdar

Water shortages, desertification, air pollution, deforestation, food shortages and last, but not least, global warming: these environmental menaces threaten all of our future but none perhaps more than that of Asia's rising giants. Despite important differences, India and China share one enormous challenge: how to grow their economies fast enough to move hundreds of millions out of poverty without utterly destroying the environment, within their own territory and beyond. Environmental damage already poses a growing threat not just to economic growth but also to public health, as well as to political and social stability. Will India and China find a way out of this dilemma before it's too late? What is the stake for the rest of us? And what should the advanced economies of Japan, the United States and the European Union do to help tackle this conundrum that ultimately threatens us all?

When the financial bubble was only beginning to lose a little air, common wisdom held that the emerging economies, especially those of Asian giants India and China, would weather any coming meltdown just fine. Their own domestic markets, we were told, had grown so robust, these would simply substitute for any loss in the export markets of the United States and Europe teetering on the financial brink. While it is true that India, and even more so China, are coping better than many so-called advanced economies, it is also clear now that they are hardly immune from what has grown into the most serious economic crisis the world has seen in decades. Tens of millions of Chinese and Indian workers have returned to their villages, the factories where they worked shut down, the corporate offices where they aspired to the good life pared down to a minimum. India's growth has fallen from a 2007 peak of over 9 percent to less than 7 percent. China's from a white-hot 12 percent to below 8 percent. Those lowered numbers still look pretty good from the negative-growth perspective of some of us, but they are hardly sufficient to generate the employment or the purchasing power India and China need for hundreds of millions of their people who remain stuck making a marginal living at best. How fast will India and China recover from the current global economic crisis? What will be the political fallout, both in terms of lowered expectations domestically and in terms of anger and frustration at the one country most people around the world blame for the current mess, the United States? How can we chart a course forward that restores solid and sustainable economic well being for all of us?