Hong Kong must kick its bad habit of overconsumption
C. W. Cheung and Allen To say in a world fast running out of resources, Hong Kong will find it more and more difficult to feed its habit of overconsumption. It's time to go on a diet
We all know Hong Kong is a materialistic society. As a city, we collectively love acquiring "stuff": clothes, gadgets, accessories … the list is endless. Shopping is the No 1 hobby for many and it's a major pillar of our economy - one need look no further than Causeway Bay on a Friday night to see the evidence.
What is less easy to see is that our consumption habits are damaging the planet. Since the resources we are using - and the damage we are inflicting - are often elsewhere, we can't see the problem.
To begin the necessary process of change, a link needs to be created between our propensity to overconsume and the environmental damage this creates in other parts of the world. Getting people to really see this is a difficult task.
"Show and tell" is not enough, though Hong Kong consumers do need to be shown the consequences of our habits: the deforested areas of Borneo - stripped bare to provide hardwood for furniture and floors that damaged the habitat of the Sumatran tiger; the shrunken Aral Sea - trillions of gallons of its water diverted to produce cotton for the fashion industry which destroyed the fishing livelihood over there; a reduced sea-ice season as a result of climate change that has affected the survival of polar bears; thousands of tonnes of live reef fish harvested from Southeast Asia to supply Hong Kong and the booming mainland market that has depleted regional marine resources.
Let's put our consumption into a quantifiable perspective. The ecological footprint is a measure of how much biologically productive land and sea is required to produce all the resources a city or country consumes and to store its waste. According to our report, Hong Kong has the 26th largest per capita ecological footprint of the 150 places surveyed. If everyone lived the lifestyle we lead, we would need 2.6 earths to fulfil the demand for resources.
"So what?" you may ask, "Hong Kong can afford to import everything we need - we're rich!" And you would be correct - for now. The problem is, since the 1970s, the earth has been in a state of "global overshoot", whereby the planet is renewing its resources at a rate slower than it is losing them.