Letters | Hong Kong’s protests are not the real emergency the city faces – climate change is

Amid all the current turmoil in Hong Kong, it’s tempting to forget the fundamentally more urgent picture, which affects us all every waking minute. The Amazon rainforest is being burned right now, to create more farmland to support the industry producing the Brazilian beef we avidly purchase in Hong Kong supermarkets and fast-food burger chains; the polar ice caps are melting at a rate that is shocking our leading climate scientists; our seas are being polluted; our weather patterns are increasingly more extreme; and we are daily losing animal and plant species at a horrifying rate.

Whatever Hong Kong’s political future, its economic and environmental future is horrifyingly bleak unless we all take steps – individually, collectively and on a corporate level, and without further delay – to radically reduce our carbon footprint.

This means replacing carbon-based energy sources with sustainable energy sources here in Hong Kong, replacing business air travel with online conferences wherever possible, increasing staycations and reducing holidays involving air travel, reducing our use of private cars to a bare minimum, ending fast fashion and buying any item we don’t actually need, and radically reducing our meat consumption, all as a matter of emergency.