Hong Kong: Support a Better Central Waterfront!

A message from Designing Hong Kong:

If you care about a quality harbourfront for Hong Kong, please read on...

There have been many public forums and organisations to get community feedback on the new Central waterfront. The response from all these has been very clear. People want:

Less density
More greenery
More diversity
A boulevard instead of a six-lane highway running through the middle

These wishes will require changes to the current Outline Zoning Plan, but the Government refuses to countenance any changes. It is sticking to the current "big block" footprints and a "thundering thoroughfare" (the so-called "P2" passing right through the middle. This does not reflect public's wishes and will result in a sub-optimal harbourfront. Since this is the last reclamation on the Central harbourfront, it is the last chance for us to get it right and create something we can all love and be proud of.

Designing Hong Kong has now taken the initiative to make its own
application to the Town Planning Board to revise the existing Outline Zoning Plan to reflect what people want. THIS APPLICATION NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT.

To support this initiative, go to the link below, click "Express Support" and send the signed Support Form to the Town Planning Board.

Please take the time to do something for our future harbourfront. Please forward this message.

GO HERE: http://www.designinghongkong.com

Designing Hong Kong is an alliance of four individuals:
* Christine Loh, former Legislative Councilor and CEO of the non-profit think-tank Civic Exchange
* Peter H. Y Wong, Chartered Accountant, Past Chairman of the Business and Professionals Federation of Hong Kong, and member of the Greater Pearl River Delta Business Council and the Executive Committee of the Commission on Strategic Development
* Markus Shaw, Chairman of WWF Hong Kong and member of the Advisory Council on the Environment
* Paul Zimmerman, Executive Director of Jebsen Travel, Convenor of Designing Hong Kong Harbour District and Vice-Chairman of the Coalition on Sustainable Tourism.

Click here for the English press release.
Click here for the Chinese press release.

Interesting Poolside Read

Was going through the latest Skoll Foundation e-newsletter and came across this item from SustainAbility: "Raising Our Game: Can We Sustain Globalization? is a new report that looks out to 2027 to examine future scenarios for the world’s sustainable development, and to propose a new set of rules for business to rise to the unprecedented challenges ahead. The interplay of sustainable development and globalisation is defining the future and the stakes for the planet are rising. Raising Our Game: Can We Sustain Globalization? looks at the trade-offs involved in future choices over environmental and social value, and at the role still to be played by innovation, entrepreneurship and the emerging economies of the South. There will be winners and losers, but no more business as usual."

Goodwill Download

So Madonna's "Hey You" put me to sleep, but at least I slept well with visions of good that would come from msn.com donating a maximum of US$250,000 (US$0.25 per download) to the Alliance for Climate Protection. You can download the song now for FREE in the next 6 days (you don't have to listen to it unless you are suffering from insomnia). Also, check out the line-up for the upcoming Live Earth concerts in New York, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro and Hamburg on 7 July 2007.

Hong Kongers: Please Join the Clean Air Foundation!

I returned to a very grey, gloomy, hazy, rainy Hong Kong after 4 days of blissful blue skies and fresh, clean ocean breeze. We, in Hong Kong, all complain ad nauseum about the poor air quality and visibility, so here's our chance to do just a tad bit more constructive than complain!

Please join the Clean Air Foundation (please see below for brief summary of what they are doing) by taking just 1 minute of your time to click this link and fill in your basic contact details.

The Clean Air Foundation is a recently created not-for-profit Hong Kong company aimed primarily to promote and protect the right of the people of Hong Kong to breathe clean air. The Clean Air Foundation will pay particular attention to local sources of air pollution and to the role of Hong Kong in both causing and solving local environmental problems.

The air in Hong Kong is killing us slowly but surely.

The government of HKSAR is not fulfilling its most basic responsibility to provide clean air for its citizens. The aim of the Clean Air Foundation is to galvanise the support of citizens and concern groups to find appropriate recourse to exhort the HKSAR government to leave behind its empty promises and hollow rhetoric. We must immediately begin to address the many local sources of air pollution for which something can and must be done.

Please join the Clean Air Foundation and be part of promoting and protecting the rights of Hong Kong citizens to breathe clear air. To make your voice heard, please press "reply" and fill in the information below and send to: info@cleanairfoundation.hk or visit our website and fill in the form online at www.cleanairfoundation.hk

Membership Applicant Information

*Last Name:

*Given Name(s):

Organisation:

Address:

Contact Phone:

*Email:

* Denotes required fields

Hotels Using Alternative Energy

My bedtime reading of late has mainly consisted of research reports on alternative energy investment opportunities. All that got me thinking about which hotels use alternative energy. As always, the answer was just a quick Google search away:
1. A recent Interior Design article: "Green Upscale Hotels -- No Longer an Oxymoron"
2. Environmentally Friendly Hotels website
3. Alternative Energy blog

Am sure there's a lot more hotels out there. Could be another Little Cream Book in the making.

Carbon Neutral Travels

Those who read my previous post about watching An Inconvenient Truth on a flight back to Hong Kong from JFK will know that I stopped driving in Hong Kong because of this film. Of course, there was a bit of irony in the fact that while I was watching this film about the climate crisis, I was contributing more than 3 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.

I was reading the online preview of this Sunday's (10 December 2006) New York Times Magazine and came across Michelle Higgin's article, Carbon Neutral: Raising the Ante on Eco-Tourism. It got me thinking about how much CO2 production my travel planning business enables each year. Most of my friends and clients would probably qualify as globetrotters who contribute at least 11 tons (or 22,500lbs) of CO2 each year from their flights (To qualify for Marco Polo Club Gold Status, you need to fly 60,000 miles). Now, there's a way to offset these carbon emissions and theoretically make one's jet-setting carbon-neutral (would also need to factor in hotel stays and drives). To calculate how much CO2 is produced, check out this calculator from Sustainable Travel International (STI also allows you to offset by buying CO2 offsets from myclimate.org). The article also mentions terrapass.com, which also has a very user-friendly site.

I did a bit of comparison shopping between the 2 sites for the cost of offsetting a round-trip Hong Kong to London Heathrow flight:
terrapass.com calculates the flight as 11,959 miles, emitting 4,664 lbs of CO2. From their site, I could buy 2 packages, each offsetting 2,500 lbs of CO2 for US$9.95 each. The total cost: US$19.90.
sustainabletravelinternational.org (partnering with myclimate.org) calculates the flight as 19,286km (roughly 11,984 miles), emitting 3,68 tons (roughly 7,360 lbs of CO2). From their site, a total offset would cost US$48.76.
As would be expected, the Europeans are stricter with their calculations than the Americans.

Now I know what I can get all my ski-bunny, performance car-driving, jet-setting friends and family for Christmas. Also, from 2007, WANLILU Play will use STI's calculator (because a report published by Clean Air-Cool Planet, released on 5 December 2006, ranks STI/myclimate.org as one of the "top performing" providers of retails carbon offsets. For a great discussion of this somewhat controversial report, check out this blog entry on World Changing's site) to calculate the amount of CO2 emissions for all the flights our clients. For clients who choose to buy carbon credits, we will match their carbon offset purchases up to 10% of the fee we charge for planning their trip (our minimum planning fee is US$1,000 per trip). Of course, I will do the same with my travels.

In-flight Education: An Inconvenient Truth

I had a great flight from JFK back to HK, where it was easier for me to stay awake through the night (morning in HK time) by watching action/adventure movies and television shows. But the most engaging and thought-provoking movie I watched was the last one I watched over breakfast service: Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Most people have known for some time that global warming is a problem. I certainly feel the effects in my day-to-day life in Hong Kong these past few years as pollution has gotten worse and worse. Just being in the US and Canada these past couple of months, I have been able to breath much easier and feel a lot healthier. Granted, I also had a healthier lifestyle, but one should not underestimate the restorative power of being able to breath clean, healthy air. And it's also worrying that in these past couple of years, I've had much more exposure to friends or family of friends falling ill from cancer. And these are relatively young people between the ages of 35 and 60. The facts and statistics Al Gore presents are quite shocking. When you see the dramatic spike in C02 emissions and rise in global temperature in the past few decades relative to a relatively stable span of 650,000 years, it wakes you up to the scale of the problem. We all know that global warming is a fact, but as Al Gore pointed out, most of us are frogs sitting contentedly in a pot of water that is slowing coming to boil, oblivious to the eventual consequences. If you haven't seen the film, try to see it. There's plenty more information on the website: www.climatecrisis.net.

An Inconvenient Truth doesn't just tell you how dire the global warming problems is. It places the responsibility for solving the problem back in the hands of each individual. The website gives more information on how to take action. The movie even inspired me to make a small change; I took the train to work today.

Hong Kong: Asia's Polluted City

I miss blue skies and starry skies. Been back for 3 days, and I've been living in a haze, litterally. It's not jet lag; it's that grey film hanging over the city that obstructs visibility and causes all sorts of respiratory tract and sinus irritations. I love living in Hong Kong, but the poor air quality is what will eventually send me packing to live in other parts of the world where I can breathe with ease -- Vancouver immediately comes to mind or even New York City, where most of the days I've spent there have been blue sky days.

At a recent lunch conversation, we were talking about a mutual acquaintance now living in Sydney. One, who was in recent contact with him, reported that he was a happy, health-conscious yoga instructor in his spare time and added, "It's amazing what breathing can do for you!" It's true. I walk around this city and see so many stressed-out, blank, even miserable-looking faces. If only they could spend a day on the ski slopes or a night camping under the star-lit skies! Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain has been the talk of the town even before it won Lee an Oscar for Best Director. The advertising tagline for the movie is: "Everyone has their own Brokeback Mountain". I would say that a large majority of the 7 million people living in Hong Kong have not had the luxury of spending a night in untouched wilderness with the stars to light their path and the sounds of nature to lull them to sleep. For those who want the luxe version of this, they should spend a night sleeping in the star beds at Loisaba in Kenya.

Hong Kong's tourism board should really be more proactive about alleviating the air quality problem. It's Rugby Sevens weekend here. Tons of visitors in town. But I wonder how the players feel about playing and breathing in all this polluted air. And the visual impression of Hong Kong most tourists will depart with will be a skyline hidden in haze. Imagine how much more beautiful Hong Kong would be with its stellar skyline, shimmering in the clear harbour, against a backdrop of verdant, green mountains and clear, blue skies!

Hong Kong pays a lot of lip service to wanting to be "Asia's World City", nurturing more competitive atheletes or even becoming a more creative, innovation-led economy. How can we do any of these things when we struggle so hard, day after day, just to breathe a breath of clean, fresh air and catch a clear glimpse of our inspiring cityscape?

It'll probably be a while before we have clean air again. In the meantime, perhaps Pure Yoga might consider conducting yoga classes in oxygen-enriched yoga studios and Pure Fitness might want to convert its hypoxic cardio room into an oxygen-enriched cardio room.

Today is actually a sunny day, but this is the view from my office in Causeway Bay, with a sliver of a view of Tsim Sha Tsui across what's left of our still-shrinking Victoria Harbour:




Wi-Fi connection used:
netvigator account @ Starbucks: HK$3/10 minutes or HK$18/hour