Sustainable Living Hong Kong

Lau Wong Fat, Executive Councilor, Legislative Councilor, Tuen Mun District Councilor and Heung Yee Kuk representative, has accumulated agricultural land and village rights in the western part of the New Territories and is now for the third time trying to gain Town Planning Board approval for a massive development.

The development is not for the benefit of villagers in need of a home for family members, but simply to make a buck out of luxury residential property smack in the middle of another area of untouched beauty in Hong Kong. Like Sai Wan, approval of this application will promote similar attempts in other protected or sensitive rural areas.

Click here to submit your views on Pak Nai to the Town Planning Board before midnight August 27. The development proposal has no merit: there is no social or economic pressure to warrant this development which is completely inappropriate in relation to the zoning intentions, irrespective of the un-bankable protective proposals it has included:

1. The agriculture land is specifically designated to “retain and safeguard good quality agricultural land/fish ponds for agricultural purposes”.
2. The area is part of a rural landscape surrounded by a Coastal Protection Area “intended to conserve, protect and retain the natural coastlines and the sensitive coastal natural environment”.
3. Cost of public infrastructure including road widening and re-alignment of planned routes required would be enormous, and disproportionate to the planning gain.
4. 70% of the application area is part of the Ha Pak Nai Archaeological Site with important historical remains confirming “the position of Hong Kong in the history of Chinese culture” lies in the centre of the proposed development. For this reason, the site was previously deemed unsuitable for the Integrated Waste Management Facility.
5. Development will have considerable impact on the Deep Bay Water Control Zone;
6. The habitats supporting horseshoe crabs, including spawning grounds, a nursery crèche for juvenile horseshoe crabs and adult foraging grounds will be impacted;
7. The sea-grass beds, the largest in Hong Kong, are extremely vulnerable to pollution, particularly land runoff and siltation from soil erosion during development and from road run-off;
8. Two egretries, including the largest Little Egret breeding colony in Hong Kong, owe their existence to the solitude of the area;
9. The streams and intertidal mudflats are foraging grounds for Black-faced Spoonbills in the winter months. The slightest disturbance and these shy birds will flee.
10. Previous ecological assessments for the Deep Bay Coastal Road remain valid. Development will bring serious ecological impacts to coastal and off shore areas of high ecological value, destroying habitats and fragmenting and disturbing the remainder. Disturbance and water quality changes, will impact horseshoes crabs, breeding herons and egrets. The only mitigation measure is avoidance of construction and development all together.

Protection and conservation measures required

The application for an OU(RU) “other uses (rural uses)” zoning is misleading as it disguises a Comprehensive Development Area application. The Town Planning Board should reject this application and put in place protection measures of this area and the nearby coastline. A comprehensive environmental impact assessment should be carried before any rezoning for development is considered, and any development should be considered to be a Designated Project under the Environmental Impact Assessment Ordinance.

Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith has set up a A$1 million prize for anyone below the age of 30 who can come up with the best solution to stop capitalist society’s addiction to consumption and population growth.

The Wilberforce Award is named after the 19th century English politician William Wilberforce, who campaigned for the abolition of slavery despite warnings that it would lead to economic collapse.

As some of us are already all too aware, Mr Smith believes the planet, with its finite resources, cannot cope with the exponential expansion of the human population and, if nothing is done to reverse it, human civilisation will collapse. He said he was looking for a person brave enough to go against the grain of growing populations. “We need our Wilberforce winner to abolish the slavery of today, which is to abolish the ridiculous addiction to exponential growth.”

Potential winners do not have to apply. Instead, Mr Smith said he would monitor the global media to look for someone who has made a “significant contribution” to the discussion and “who also becomes famous through his or her contribution to the debate”.

The award is to be announced in one year’s time. To be eligible, one has to:

• be under the age of 30
• believe in maintaining stable population numbers and a sustainable consumption of energy and resources
• come up with and communicate successfully alternatives to consumption-driven economic growth
• get noticed in the media for campaigning on such issues.

Watch Mr Smith explain the prize below.

It has taken humanity less than nine months to exhaust its ecological budget for the year, according to data from Global Footprint Network, a California-based environmental research organization.

Global Footprint Network calculates nature’s supply in the form of biocapacity, the amount of resources the planet regenerates each year, and compares that to human demand: the amount it takes to produce all the living resources we consume and absorb our carbon dioxide emissions.

Its data reveal that, as of August 21, humanity will have demanded all the ecological services – from filtering CO2 to producing the raw materials for food – that nature can provide this year.

From now until the end of the year, we will meet our ecological demand by depleting resource stocks and accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“If you spent your entire annual income in nine months, you would probably be extremely concerned,” said Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel.

“The situation is no less dire when it comes to our ecological budget. Climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water and food shortages – these are all clear signs that we can no longer finance our consumption on credit. Nature is foreclosing.”

What is Overshoot?

For most of human history, humanity has been able to live off of nature’s interest – consuming resources and producing carbon dioxide at a rate lower than what the planet was able to regenerate and reabsorb each year.

But approximately three decades ago, we crossed a critical threshold, and the rate of human demand for ecological services began to outpace the rate at which nature could provide them.

This gap between demand and supply – known as ecological overshoot – has grown steadily each year. It now takes one year and six months to regenerate the resources that humanity requires in one year.

Every year, Global Footprint Network calculates humanity’s Ecological Footprint – the amount of productive land and sea area required to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, including CO2 emissions – and compares that with biocapacity, the ability of ecosystems to regenerate resources.

Earth Overshoot Day, a concept devised by UK-based new economics foundation, is calculated from 2007 data (the most recent year for which data are available) and projections based on historical rates of growth in population and consumption, as well as the historical link between world GDP and resource demand.

Last year, Earth Overshoot Day was observed on September 25, 2009. This year, overshoot day is estimated to come more than a month earlier in the year. This is not due to a sudden change in human demand, but rather to improvements in the calculation methodology that enable us to more adequately capture the extent of overshoot. (For example, our latest data show the world has less biocapacity available, primarily in the area of grazing land, than previously estimated.)

“We would expect our estimates of overshoot to be, if anything, conservative.” Wackernagel said.

“We know we are far from living within the means of one planet. The good news is, much of the technology we have to begin to address this problem is available and it is open source: things like compact urban design, energy-efficient housing, ecological tax reform, removal of resource subsidies, safe and affordable family planning, bicycles, low-meat diets, and life-cycle costing.”

To calculate your own personal Ecological Footprint, and learn what you can do to reduce it, go to www.footprintnetwork.org/calculator.

With all the discussion about property prices and the many problems it spawns – such as the rising gap between the rich and the poor, mental illness and overwork from living in pint-sized apartments and spending hours in a metal tube getting to and from work, disillusionment amongst youth at the prospect of never owning their own home—it is worthwhile to step back and ask:  just how bad is the situation?  Is it all huff and politicking, with various interests using property as a way to advance their own agendas?

It’s always a good idea to start with facts.  The  Economist looks at “fair value” of property in major economies, which is based on comparing current ratio of house prices to rents, with its long-term average.  In other words, this will tell us how much the current situation is out of line with the long term.

The chart shows that prices in Hong Kong have risen the 2nd most globally on a year-on-year basis, exceeded only by Singapore.  But on a fair value basis, Hong Kong’s property is extremely overvalued, again ranking 2nd.  Hong Kong’s fair value reading is 53.6, with 0 being fair value, i.e. Hong Kong property is at 53.6% above its fair value.  And despite the much reported rise in Singapore property prices, prices are just 20.3% above long term trends.

We already know that Hong Kong’s residential property prices are already among the world’s highest—exceeded only by Monaco and London. What the Economist chart tells us is that things are getting worse, and that we are hitting the extremes of our own trends.

But this is not a “political” blog; so does it have anything to do with sustainability?

One of the keys to a sustainable society is that its citizens feel that what they give is justly in line with what they get, or at least that they have the prospect of reaching such a stage; and that the economic and ecological products of this relation can be sustained over time.  So long as high property prices end up disenfranchising more and more people, we should “call a spade” and say that the trend is unsustainable.

Hong Kong’s double whammy is that most of the building are also environmentally unsound in construction and operation, while producing no economic benefit to society at large (though they do produce profit for a small number of operators).  We need both environmental and economic sustainability.  In Hong Kong’s property market, we get neither.

We are familiar with the fact that the world is overpopulated, yet instead of rejoicing, governments panic when the fertility rate goes down. Why’s that?

The reason given is always the same: that an ageing population with its increasing demand for healthcare and pensions being supported by a shrinking workforce places too much pressure on public coffers. So the typical solution is to do all they can to boost the fertility rate, so that there will be more younger people paying the taxes that will go towards supporting the older people.

It’s not hard to see what the global implication of this approach is, but tell that to the Hong Kong Government. The head of the Census and Statistics Department is of the opinion that, if Hong Kongers can’t be persuaded to have more babies, then more mainlanders must be persuaded to settle here. And he called it “sustainable development”.

Exactly how many people can you squeeze into this tiny dot in the South China Sea before people get so fed up with the overcrowdedness that they all turn into Bus Uncles, prone to vent themselves at strangers that rub them up the wrong way? And what happens to the young people when they get old? There’ll be quite a lot of them if the government gets its way. Does it then try to get more young people one way or another to ensure sufficient tax revenue comes in?

The crunch is going to come at some point; besides, the planet’s already close to its ecological limits. Rather than rely on boosting population growth to avert a pension and healthcare crisis, governments should, first of all, stop its obsession with economic growth – although the provision of goods and services for the elderly will play a significant role in the economic development of a mature city.

A lifecycle approach towards the issue should also be adopted: many of the problems that typify old age actually trace their origins to the earlier stages of life. For example, someone who is obese as a child is more likely to grow up with diabetes, heart disease and other ailments. Tackling these problems early on by diet and lifestyle interventions will drastically reduce the health cost impact decades down the line. From this perspective, failure to act because the government doesn’t want to interfere with the free market is gross irresponsibility.

Many of today’s older folks are relatively healthy because they’ve grown up eating a traditional diet and are used to being quite active, doing tai chi or regularly visiting the market. By contrast, today’s young people – those who will be old a few decades later – fill their stomachs with junk food and spend all day playing computer games. How the health of this segment of the population will pan out in the long term ought to be a major concern.

The result of short-termism on the part of the government is likely to be future generations that suffer poor health as well as a heavy financial burden, not to mention the environmental degradation that will be too late too reverse. There’s nothing sustainable about such an approach.

When the government was lobbying to set up the plastic bag levy as part of the drive to reduce plastic bag use, it said the levy would raise HK$200 million a year.

Quite how it arrived at that figure is anybody’s guess; after one year’s implementation, the scheme has generated just 10% of that estimate for the public coffers. The Environmental Protection Department says it’s nonetheless a worthy exercise. It would be if it hadn’t created a mountain of hard-to-recycle, woven plastic bags that sits in the back of most people’s cupboards at home.

The government is highly accomplished in making up attractive numbers to justify its schemes. Roads that will carry so many vehicles per year that end up deserted enough to be used as golf driving ranges; number of jobs to be created by such and such projects; dollar value in “economic benefit” to be generated….

If the auditor were to delve into them all, wouldn’t he get a heart attack?

Not that the government cares: once the schemes get approved, it no longer matters whether those figures are accurate or not. Who’s checking?

While we’re on the subject, how much in economic value has been generated by Disneyland? And how much of it constitutes export leakage – the amount Disney as the foreign partner takes home to the US – rather than remains in Hong Kong to benefit the local economy? And what will happen when Shanghai Disneyland comes on stream, over the demolished homes of ordinary folks?

As a publisher our commitment is to use recycled paper or pulp certified by the Forest Stewardship Council when something has to be printed, but unless one is ultra-conscientious, it’s hard to ensure every paper product that passes through one’s hands is minimally environmentally damaging.

I say “minimally environmentally damaging” rather than “environmentally friendly” because virtually all paper products will have an impact to a greater or lesser degree. Recycled paper still requires energy to process so it can be used again, and “sustainable forests” tend to involve monoculture that leads to a loss of biodiversity.

Are such considerations ever taken into account in the Hong Kong market, though, I wonder, since not even the green groups seem to object to the “100% virgin pulp” tissue and toilet paper that fills the supermarket shelves here.

When consumers care so little, it is no wonder that the conglomerate Asia Pulp and Paper has got away with destruction of rainforests in Indonesia, since its big-name customers from HP to Campbell Soup, Marie Claire to Esquire; are happy to continue doing business with it.

The United Nations had a bright idea to encourage rainforest conservation: under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation scheme, countries will be paid to look after rather than cut down their rainforests, with the money coming from corporations which will be awarded carbon credits in return. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working: illegal logging continues while so many carbon credits are awarded for such dubious offsets that prices on existing carbon markets crash.

Meanwhile, back in Hong Kong, the government continues to refuse to regulate junk mail. No, actually, it does: it’s illegal to shove unsolicited marketing material through mailboxes, unless it’s officially posted, so Hongkong Post can make a tidy sum. Rainforest, what rainforest?

Anyone heard of the entropy law/2nd law of thermodynamics? No? Are economists plain dumb, or exceedingly good at perpetuating a web of deception on us?

According to conventional economics, economic growth is due to increases in the two factors of production, ie. labour and capital. Unfortunately for the economists who’d like to claim their field as a science, the real scientists plotted GDP growth over the years and discovered that increased inputs from these two factors did not account for the rate of growth actually registered in the US, Japan and Germany over a 30-year period.

What made up the difference was the energy input. GDP growth was achieved by squeezing more productivity out of capital and labour with the help of (mostly) fossil fuels, and energy efficiency has always been part of the process. If less energy is needed to produce the same amount of goods, then the cost of making them is lowered; the price comes down and demand goes up. Profit goes up, stimulating more investment and therefore more production.

Energy efficiency, therefore, works as a positive feedback loop. The public is sold on the idea of energy efficiency being a good thing, when in reality it’s just a business-as-usual scenario dressed up as climate change mitigation. Here I am going on and on about the Jevons Paradox, when, for our governments and corporations, the Jevons Paradox is the whole point. Duh.

But this can’t go on forever, not only because of climate change, but also because of the entropy law/2nd law of thermodynamics, which states that a certain amount of energy that is available to do work becomes lost when it is converted from one form to another. Thus, you may find some use for the gas coming out of the car’s tailpipe, but it won’t give you anywhere near the same mileage as the tank of petrol that was burnt to give it off.

Governments and businesses can ignore the environmental damage of extracting all the raw materials for making unnecessary consumer goods and persuade us that they are achieving “green growth” by improving energy efficiency or using “green energy”, but the sums won’t add up because of this law.

Don’t believe any of it.

We are staring peak oil in the face, and while factories aren’t run on petroleum, the supply chain of ships, lorries and cargo planes are. If we don’t stop spinning this “carbon intensity” story and start looking seriously at ways to slam on the brakes – literally I’m afraid – then we could be confronted with inflation, recession and perhaps even geopolitical war.

I have a severely bulimic friend who is regularly heard retching in the toilet after a meal. In the early days, colleagues thought it was an achievement when they managed to get her to eat a small piece of something at the office lunches that everybody had to attend, not knowing she’d retch even harder afterwards.

For years those who cared tried and tried to help her, but she could never see anything wrong with keeping herself so scarily thin. She’s in her mid-40s now, but looks over 60. All her teeth had fallen out but the false set that she’d had had made can no longer be used because her gums have receded and it hurts to put it on anyway.

And yet, everywhere we go, we continue to be bombarded with advertising for weight loss programmes and various cosmetics that tout the body beautiful. Some people have really hit pay dirt by playing on women’s sense of insecurity: cosmetic firms have listed on the stock exchange and are doing a roaring trade, while women – and girls not yet in their teens – in their millions suffer because they don’t look like the perfectly airbrushed models on billboards and in magazines.

Destroying a woman’s self-esteem is big business and the process starts early: a survey estimated that a young girl, or pre-teen, spends on average US$7,170 on beauty treatments. This goes up to US$65,865 for one in her teens or 20s; to US$158,160 for one in her 30s/40s; and US$217,932 for the over-50s.

You know, marketers are probably reading this post and rubbing their hands in glee.

Both the mental and physical health of women are compromised by this obsession. As if environmental pollution is not bad enough, the average woman is estimated to voluntarily put 515 chemicals on herself everyday. Is it any surprise that incidents of cancers and skin diseases are on the rise? And it’s a vicious cycle: the chemicals get washed off and enter the sea, poisoning marine life and eventually us, through the seafood we consume.

As if that’s not bad enough, many doctors have thrown the Hippocratic oath out the door and encouraged women to undergo plastic surgery, not for medical reasons, but simply to change the way they look. Someone else I know went to a plastic surgeon to have fatty deposits removed from her eyelids because they were obstructing her vision. Guess what the surgeon did? He hard-sold her a “cut-price” syringe of Botox left from treating another patient because he’d lose the money if it was thrown away. She declined, which was so unusual he became enraged.

Now the women’s market is not making enough money for these people and men too are being targeted. Is this to be celebrated as progress?

I’m not as optimistic as the makers of this animation, but they’ve got the reasons for the Copenhagen failure spot on. I also agree that it’s up to all of us, working at the grassroots level, that will save us and our children from hell and brimstone, not the governments nor their business sponsors that profess to care so much about climate change.

Coalition Of The Willing from coalitionfilm on Vimeo.