Hong Kong's political squabbles claim a victim in the environment
Edwin Lau laments lack of drive to promote recycling and cut emissions
Hong Kong is painfully going through its biggest political controversy. Although the once occupied roads have been reopened to traffic, our city is still facing serious "congestion" on many fronts.
For instance, the government has proposed building a plant locally to treat our waste electrical and electronic equipment with the proper environmental controls, instead of exporting such waste to other places for recycling. The idea has been supported by legislators in the past, but it is now stuck in the long queue for approval in the Legislative Council. That's not good for the environment.
While Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying has tried hard to build more affordable homes for Hongkongers, he should also be putting in equal or more effort to bring back a decent living environment, with healthy air, clean water and food, a greener urban environment and well-conserved country parks. What good is a decent home if we get sick from air pollution or contaminated food?
Polluted air leads to illnesses, death and economic losses. In his policy address, Leung announced the setting up of low-emission zones in Causeway Bay, Central and Mong Kok to control the entry of high-emission franchised buses. Yet these buses account for only 40 per cent of the traffic in such zones. Why are other vehicles, especially commercial diesel vehicles, not targeted as well?
Although the government has in place a subsidy scheme for phasing out old commercial diesel vehicles by 2020 at the latest, more of these vehicles could be taken off the roads earlier if the low-emission zones included commercial diesel vehicles too. Offering carrots and a bigger stick will bring back cleaner air much faster.
Environment chief Wong Kam-sing said at the policy address briefing that he would collaborate with the Transport and Housing Bureau to tackle poor roadside air quality with measures to control the traffic.
Wong has seldom talked about this area since it is beyond the scope of the Environment Bureau. However, if we look at successful cases in other cities such as Singapore and London, we should be able to see light at the end of the tunnel.
Our government needs to work harder to convince stakeholders in the automobile business, logistics industry, district councils and the like to buy into such a strategy.
The latest engine technologies have made vehicular emissions much lower than they were decades ago, but if our government does not consider controlling vehicle growth and road use priority, I envisage that, in just a few years, our roads will be occupied with chains of private cars and buses, and neither roadside air quality nor traffic congestion will have improved greatly.
While the annual average concentrations of several key pollutants have dropped slightly from 2010 to 2014, the government has yet to conduct a study to figure out the sources of the relatively high (18 per cent) increase of ozone concentration for the same period. The administration has claimed that the increase is mainly due to regional changes.
The government should have registered the rising trend for ozone within the last five years, and conducted regional studies, with the support of other local authorities, to identify the sources and devise appropriate policies together to tackle the problem.
I don't expect that Leung has a lot of great plans for the environment as he is under pressure to focus more on social and political challenges right now.
But I would like to remind him of the principle of "sustainable development", which covers three aspects: social, environmental and economic development. This should be the guiding principle for Hong Kong's future.
