Opinion | Hong Kong’s ‘revolution of our times’ should focus on climate change

The city’s youth would find Beijing more open to a dialogue on how the country can enhance its global leadership in the fight against climate change

Hong Kong can play a role in bringing the US and China together on the issue

Reading Time:4 minutes

Volunteer first-aid workers look out across Victoria Harbour in Tamar, Admiralty, during a protest against the Hong Kong government’s extradition bill on June 18. As they fight for a better future, Hong Kong’s anti-government protesters should broaden their scope to encompass climate change. Photo: Dickson Lee

Published: 9:00am, 29 Dec 2019Updated: 9:00am, 29 Dec 2019

Hong Kong’s young people might ponder their future through the lens of climate change rather than the narrower “revolution of our times”. If they did, they would find the threat to be very large and real, backed by authoritative evidence, and it wouldn’t matter where they lived in the world. They, and their children, are going to be greatly affected.

Their future is in the hands of the world’s major carbon emitters, which include China, the United States, the European Union, India, Russia and Japan.

Governments from around the world meet annually to negotiate details to a framework treaty agreed in 2015 in Paris, known as the Paris Agreement, the purpose of which is to give humanity a chance to stay within a safe climate space. The treaty comes into force on January 1, 2020.

This year’s meeting, which just ended in Madrid, was intended to build momentum towards next year’s meeting in Glasgow, when new and updated commitments to meet the goal to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and strive for less than 1.5 degrees, would be unveiled.

The most important of the issues the Madrid meeting intended to tackle was pushing for enhanced ambition in the commitments from countries because the world is in fact heading for a temperature rise of 3.2 degrees by 2100.

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