How should Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta develop? There is clearly a need for economic development and environmental protection to go hand in hand. The old assumption that we can get rich first, then worry about the environment is decidedly passe. We are now quite rich, but the environment has deteriorated significantly. Further growth must entail environmentally sensitive development that will not make things worse and will create opportunities to restore areas that have been degraded.
This is not pie in the sky. How we develop is a matter of choice. If we refrain from doing one thing, it does not mean we stop doing everything. The fear that protecting the environment means going backwards economically is unfounded.
One issue that has come to the fore just this week is how Hong Kong and Shenzhen can deal with the restricted border zone. This is a case in point: when the word 'development' is used, some people see opportunities; others see destruction. Another issue is the Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai bridge. Will it bring greater prosperity or environmental degradation?
How are our public officials dealing with these issues? Our region has the wealth to build a lot of physical infrastructure - especially highways, bridges and buildings - in the name of economic development and job creation. The beauty for rich authorities, when they spend this way, is that they can point to the construction to show they did something. The snag for investing in 'soft' infrastructure, such as education, training and public health, is that it takes much longer to see results.
Even cleaning up the environment doesn't produce very obvious results. Spending on environmental infrastructure, such as sewage systems and mending water pipes, does not always attract top priority from governments, which is why so many places still don't have decent waste-water treatment systems. And Hong Kong is only halfway to building our harbour area treatment scheme. Previous generations of decision-makers felt it was more important to invest in a new airport first.
Hong Kong and Shenzhen should consider development options based on how much additional pollution would be created, and then find other ways to reduce pollution by the same amount. If we do not do this, we will just keep adding more and more pollution in an area that has a limited capacity to absorb it. It may be hard to think of our air sheds and watersheds as having limited capacities to deal with pollution, but this is the case.