TABLE OF CONTENTS - The Professional Green Building Council

Theme B: Creating a livable, healthy and environmentally viable citiesintegrated into a huge mega scale urban region. As could have been forecasted by alook at the metabolism of giant American cities this change of global scale hascompletely transformed the metabolism of Hong Kong. Kimberley Warren-Rhodes and Albert Koenig [9] updated the Newcombe et al. pioneering study ofHong Kong's urban metabolism in 1971, highlighting trends in resourceconsumption and waste generation. Per capita food, water and materialsconsumption have surged since the early 1970s by 20%, 40%, and 149%,respectively.Tremendous pollution has accompanied this growing affluence and materialism,and total air emissions, CO 2 outputs, municipal solid wastes, and sewagedischarges have risen by 30%, 250%, 245%, and 153%. As a result, systemicoverload of land, atmospheric and water systems has occurred. While somestrategies to tackle deteriorating environmental quality have succeeded, greater andmore far-reaching changes in consumer behaviour and government policy areneeded if Hong Kong is to achieve its stated goal of becoming “a truly sustainablecity” in the 21 st century.3. MACROLEVEL ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT COMPARISON3.1 The Asia Carrying Capacity OvershootA massive social, economic, cultural and political transformation takes place asAsian countries develop vast mega-urban regions. The future of this populatedregion is an urban one, and the majority of its people will inhabit cities by 2020.Asia as a continent has overshoot its ecological carrying capacity as early as 1970,that is to say 15 years before mankind as a whole has overshoot the carryingcapacity of planet Earth in 1985. The ecological footprint of Asia is already 1.75times its carrying capacity (Fig. 4).If the creation of mega urban regions in China and in South East Asia, some ofthem 100 km radius, leads to a Los Angeles type urbanization of Asia, the418