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support of Carrie Lam, and I think the CIC zero carbon project is also supported by
Carrie. This year Carrie also went to the world conference held in Helsinki, to
learn and talk about the state of the art in the green building movement. I think
in the last two or three years we have seen a lot of changes in Hong Kong, and
those are really progressive and positive.
Reacting to your early question -- what we can foresee in the forthcoming five
years -- I think on one hand we will see more green buildings in Hong Kong. Say,
for building permits, in the first year we have got more than a hundred project
applications. If a hundred buildings per year, in five years time we could have at
least 500. Not too bad.
But I always feel that the Hong Kong people's culture is still not catching up in
many cases because, as mentioned by many people, even if we can have
hardware and good green buildings, if the people – the “software” side – the
people inside are not reacting or changing or catching up, then the actual
consumption could be as high as before.
I do look forward to seeing Dr Li's zero carbon building completed. It is not just a
case of a carbon neutral contribution from Hong Kong, but it is actually a kind of
education centre, to educate and transform people, hoping that people can be
aware of the issue and change accordingly. I think the challenge facing us is not
only about a carbon neutral new building, or retrofit, as mentioned by Dr Li.
Tomorrow morning the Business Environment Council will have their workshop
talking about transforming their own building in Kowloon Tong, to design it to
reduce carbon emissions by 40 per cent. They are targeting to have that retrofit
project completed in a year, and demonstrate the possibility of an economical
way to retrofit the project and save 40 per cent of energy costs.
But most important is how to transform the Hong Kong people's culture. Given
our territorial character, Hong Kong people are not really feeling the effect of
climate change and other energy and resource scarcity problems. I think that is a
topic that maybe Civic Exchange can do more to tackle.
Ms Christine Loh: If we had a kind of continuous data set about our building, our
flat, our building estate, or even our community -- and what is happening -- I think
we will start looking at it perhaps like the weather. What is it that Hong Kong can
do to start getting some interesting data that the people would be interested in? I
say this because Civic Exchange has worked a lot in the air pollution and public
health area and, together with the health experts at the Public Health School at
Hong Kong University, we have developed something called the Hedley
Environmental Index. What we have used in this index is the government's air
pollution data that is released moment by moment and then from that you are
able to do a calculation on health costs, days lost from work, and so on. I am just
wondering, with the Internet platform that is now available, what are some of the
things, if anybody has any ideas, that we can do to start uploading the kind of
information that will start to alert us to Hong Kong's energy use, and maybe
gradually we can get it down to the community level, to the flat level, to the
building level. I think it is a good way of energising people. I don't know what the
answer is. But is there a way that we can start this process?
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