Is Hong Kong willing to make the drastic lifestyle changes necessary to head off the climate crisis? The signs aren’t good

Drastic behavioural shifts are urgently needed, with households worldwide responsible for three-quarters of carbon emissions. In Hong Kong, as elsewhere, the challenge is to fly less, eat less meat and improve energy and transport efficiency

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Greenpeace activists at a climate change protest in Geneva on August 8. Photo: AFP

Published: 2:00pm, 25 Oct 2019Updated: 10:34pm, 25 Oct 2019

Greta Thunberg’s widely publicised sea voyage to the United Nations Climate meetings in New York provided a stark reminder of the travel price we may need to pay if we are to reduce our carbon emissions and prevent runaway climate change.

That might all feel very distant to Hong Kong’s large community of international air travellers, but in Britain, where the government has recently bound itself legally to net zero-carbon emissions by 2050, the implications are stark. As the Financial Times’ Pilita Clark noted last week, “the scale of change needed to strip emissions out of our daily lives is so huge, it means no home or office will be untouched”.

The point has been driven firmly home by Dr Richard Carmichael and a team from the Centre for Energy Policy and Technology at London’s Imperial College, in a report for the UK government’s Committee on Climate Change: so far, most of the emissions cuts achieved in our efforts to reach 2050 Paris Accord commitments have been achieved by industry, mostly in the shift to renewable energy.

But that is about to change: worldwide, households account for almost three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions, and if we are to achieve the 2050 targets, they will have to bear most of the change.

According to Carmichael’s study, transport accounts for 34 per cent of emissions in Britain, 30 per cent in agriculture and food consumption, and 21 per cent in housing, mostly for heating. It is in these areas that cuts will be needed if 2050 targets are to be met: “high-impact shifts in consumer behaviours and choices are needed,” he concludes.

The report is a marvellous attempt to focus the mind, and I have to wonder how much more focused our own Hong Kong government would be on the climate challenges we face if we undertook a similar “audit”. Apart from putting pressure on our government’s complacent reliance on natural gas for power generation into the 2030s, legally binding ourselves to net zero by 2050 would quickly transform our vague and general climate commitments into real, hard, lifestyle choices.