An ecologically rich Hong Kong wetland has been trashed by off-roaders and war-gamers, leaving it 80 per cent degraded. Green group hopes to revive it

A Hong Kong green group will spend two years reviving an ecologically rich rural Tai Po enclave that has been subject to decades of neglect and wetland degradation as a result of deadlock over development.

Despite the Sha Lo Tung valley being 90 per cent privately owned, planning issues, squabbles with indigenous inhabitants and a lack of management meant its marshes and abandoned paddy fields were left to dry out and languish.

Since the 1990s, woodlands have been cleared, vegetation burned, and streams diverted. Off-road enthusiasts still pulverise the land in four-wheel-drive vehicles and the ground is littered with plastic BB pellets left behind by war-gamers. The area is also a hotspot for illegal wildlife trapping.

To the horror of ecologists in 2016, a few villagers – upset about landowners’ failure to compensate them with new houses in the 1990s – cleared their land and attempted to grow rapeseed, a non-native species, on a green belt and conservation area.

“About 80 per cent of the wetland in the Sha Lo Tung valley has been degraded,” Green Power senior environmental affairs manager Matthew Sin Kar-wah said. “The 2016 rapeseed saga dried out the land even more. Sha Lo Tung’s original hydrology has been completely altered.”