Hong Kong will be carbon neutral by 2050, Carrie Lam vows in policy address, but environmentalists aren’t convinced

In her policy blueprint on Wednesday, the city’s leader endorses a timeline recommended by the city’s sustainability council

But observers say the council’s other recommendations have no hope of achieving the ambitious goal, and that Lam’s address was a missed opportunity

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Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam has said the city will be carbon neutral by 2050. Photo: Sam Tsang

Published: 7:58pm, 25 Nov 2020Updated: 5:48pm, 9 Dec 2020

In her annual policy address on Wednesday, city leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor vowed to set Hong Kong on a path to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, a goal greeted with scepticism by environmental activists, who said the announcement left much to be desired.

Chief Executive Lam’s ambitious pledge reflected the recommendations contained in a long-delayed policy report released earlier this month by the city’s environmental advisers, one whose drafting was beset by internal disagreements and which was itself slammed by observers for its “lukewarm” approach.

“I now announce that the [Hong Kong Special Administrative Region] will strive to achieve carbon neutrality before 2050,” Lam said in her address on Wednesday. “To this end, the Government will update the ‘Hong Kong’s Climate Action Plan’ in the middle of next year to set out more proactive strategies and measures to reduce carbon emissions.”

The pledge follows Beijing’s own announcement in late September that it would reach carbon neutrality by 2060, while Japan and South Korea have also both recently said they would hit the same target by 2050. Hong Kong’s previous climate action plan, released in 2017, only pledged a 26 to 36 per cent cut in emissions by 2030, down from 2005 levels.

Hong Kong is party to the Paris Agreement, a multilateral treaty of 196 signatories committed to holding the increase in global average temperatures to well within 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Under the agreement, the city is also obliged to formulate and submit its long-term climate strategy through 2050 by the end of this year.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam attend a press conference on her policy address on Wednesday. Photo: Sam Tsang

“Now that even China, which is an industrialised country, has set the ambitious 2060 goal, it is only expected that Hong Kong should follow the [UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] goals,” said Jeffrey Hung Oi-shing, the chief executive of the environmental NGO Friends of the Earth (HK).

Hung said that while Lam’s administration was adopting the timeline from the Council for Sustainable Development’s report, it should reconsider adopting recommendations from the council wholesale.