HK’s 5-year plan consultation offers chance to step up sustainability game

It’s doubly exciting to see that Chief Executive John Lee is launching a public consultation for Hong Kong’s inaugural five-year plan.

The first reason for excitement is that we’ve just experienced a pretty well-run public consultation; the recently updated Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan generated a lot of submissions from NGOs, companies, and members of the public.

The Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) seems to have done a good job of taking those submissions into account. In short, we’ve seen a proof of concept that public consultations seem to be effective.

The second reason for excitement is that China takes sustainability quite seriously in both word and deed. In aligning with China, the Hong Kong government has a golden opportunity to step up its sustainability game.

The outline of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan is 83 pages long. However, just as a very rough indicator of how seriously the topic is taken, Article 1, Chapter 1, Section 1 includes several comments about the energy transition and pollution.

Sustainability is considered important enough a topic to warrant some space in the prime real estate of those first few paragraphs, rubbing shoulders with big hitters like GDP and life expectancy. 

It might not be very scientific to measure a topic’s importance by which paragraph it lies in, but it is incredibly refreshing to see sustainability topics getting headline treatment instead of being tucked away on page 18.

In a similar vein, the top number in the Key Indicators of Economic and Social Development is GDP. However, in that very same table, there are binding objectives for carbon intensity goals, PM2.5 levels, and forest cover.

I get the sense that these are not just handwaved in order to hit a game of buzzword bingo – something that corporations are frequently guilty of. Rigorous thought has been put into integrating sustainability into the Five-Year Plan.

At the April 21 press conference, when Lee talked about the public consultation for the five-year plan, sustainability, carbon and pollution were not mentioned at all. Of course, GDP growth and the perennial issues of housing and education are all vital issues that need to be addressed.

However, if we’re talking in terms of five-year plans, it’s probably worth noting that in five years from now, the world needs to have carbon emissions at half of what they are today. And that in 25 years from now – just five more five-year plans away! – we need to be at net zero. Sustainability is vital too.

Of course, Hong Kong’s tiny landmass is not home to vast factories, refineries or farms. Most of the carbon that we emit is from producing electricity to power the towers that are our homes and offices.

So while emulating the priority that sustainability is afforded in China’s five-year plan is important, copy-pasting it wholesale would miss important nuance: that Hong Kong’s carbon shadow is much larger than our territorial footprint.

We import almost everything – food, energy, goods, and even water. The spectre of our carbon emissions haunts not only what we consume, but also the vast amounts of financing that flow across the world from our international financial centre.

Sustainability in Hong Kong is not just about plonking a few solar panels down; it’s a much deeper question about consumption and green finance.

That’s not to diminish the role of sustainability in our own territory; there’s plenty of room for more ambition, not just in carbon but with other forms of pollution.

For example, the Municipal Solid Waste charging scheme’s failure to progress beyond the pilot study means that there’s little push to reduce waste at source.

While it’s true that landfill rates are going down, incineration is going up – in other words, the generation of trash is not slowing down, but is instead just being diverted to the landfill in the sky. That’s not a long-term solution.

I hasten to add that putting sustainability higher on the agenda is not just important for the Hong Kong government. Company boards and executive teams ought to be discussing sustainability during their strategy meetings.

Hopefully, seeing sustainability high on the agenda in the government’s five-year plan will light a fire under corporations to up their sustainability game too.

All told, the idea of a public consultation for Hong Kong’s five-year plan is a wonderful opportunity. Public consultations have a prior form in moving the needle – the Biodiversity Strategy Action Plan has demonstrated that.

And by aligning Hong Kong’s five-year plan with China’s, we can achieve one of the most important things of all – putting sustainability on the agenda.