How to protect Hong Kong's biodiversity

For the greater part of the last 150 years, there have been two general perceptions about Hong Kong's biodiversity: that it was either limitless, or of marginal value for the city's welfare. Either way, the conservation of natural resources remained a low priority in the government's economic and environmental legal policy.

It has been suggested that Hong Kong's conservation policy was captured by a Cantonese expression, 'Sweep before your own door'. In other words, individuals in a community would only care about the condition of their own private land and ignore the public commons.

This approach is beginning to change. The diversity of Hong Kong's biological legacy gives it an environmental richness that also touches the economic landscape. It includes diversity on the level of genetics, species and ecosystems.

Biodiversity is now prominent on the special administrative region's political radar screen. It was put there by an increasingly impatient public, an emergent environmental professional class, largely populated by determined academics, dynamic non-governmental organisations and a sophisticated, if underappreciated, civil service.

The recent proposal to extend the Convention on Biological Diversity - adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro - to Hong Kong is a significant example of how environmental politics is finally coming of age here.

The main aims of the convention are to conserve biodiversity; ensure sustainable use of the components of biological diversity; and provide for the sharing of benefits arising from the exploitation of biological resources in a fair manner. It advances conventional regulatory approaches to the conservation of biodiversity. That is because it recognises that natural resources are a common concern of humanity, and that any rational conservation policy must acknowledge the relevance of development policy.

The convention is legally binding and obliges members to incorporate, within its law, principles of conservation and the sustainable use of biodiversity. It appreciates that biodiversity conservation requires investment, but claims that over the long run such investment will have not only an ecological but also an economic payoff. It calls for national biodiversity action plans to be written and incorporated into environment and development plans.