Monitor | It is time for Hong Kong to get real about water pricing
The wet stuff is too cheap, so residents waste it, but growing demand on the river that supplies the city means we have to learn to conserve it
Back in the 1960s, Hong Kong used to suffer from debilitating water shortages.
The worst was the drought of 1963 to 1964. With almost no rainfall and the limited reservoir capacity running dry, water rationing got tighter and tighter, until eventually the city's taps were allowed to work for just four hours in every four days.
In response, the government came up with some innovative measures to conserve fresh water. It installed a separate piping system to provide seawater for flushing the city's lavatories. It set aside almost a third of Hong Kong's land area as water catchment, and it embarked on a massive construction programme, building the huge Plover Cove and High Island reservoirs.
It also built the world's largest desalination plant at Lok On Pai, near what's now the Gold Coast.
The 1970s energy crisis put paid to that project, so to secure adequate water supplies for the future, the government signed a supply agreement with the mainland, piping in water from the Dongjiang, or East River, 80 kilometres away in eastern Guangdong province.