Why Hong Kong’s rich environment is part of its competitive advantage

Among all of Hong Kong’s many advantages, its unique juxtaposition of teeming urban humanity and pristine natural wilderness is too often overlooked
We eat away at our green spaces and country parks with full knowledge that we compromise our unique natural heritage at our peril

David Dodwell

Published: 4:15am, 4 Dec 2021

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No Hong Kong minister worth their salt will let a speech pass without recounting our distinct competitive advantages. We know them all by heart: rule of law, financial, legal and accounting services, trading and maritime services – and of course our unique linkages to the Greater Bay Area and as an access point to the mainland. But one competitive advantage always seems to be overlooked: wild boar.

Well, perhaps not exactly wild boar, but the extraordinary natural environment that supports them. As the government launches a debate on culling them – and, more seriously, eating away the edges of our country parks – we should pause for thought. Before we set about destroying it, we should recognise there is no natural competitive advantage more distinct than our unique juxtaposition of teeming urban humanity and pristine natural wilderness.

Here, big city opportunity sits alongside easy access to hundreds of kilometres of tranquil mountain trails and a biodiversity rarely seen elsewhere in the world.

When did a wild boar last stray into a Londoner’s back garden, or a Burmese python snack on a New York family’s cat? What San Francisco partygoer ever returned home to find a 33cm (13-inch) Atlas moth snoozing peacefully above the front door? What Tokyo office worker can leave work at 5pm and 30 minutes later be swimming in the ocean or watching the sunset from a mountain top?

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Hiking Hong Kong’s MacLehose Trail

Many thank Governor Murray MacLehose, who in 1976 set up Hong Kong’s country park system and protected around 40 per cent of the city’s land from development or urban encroachment. We have much to thank him for, but Hong Kong’s unique natural diversity and competitive advantage have more diverse roots than that.

Perhaps most important is our geographic location, far enough north to escape the year-round heat and humidity of the tropics yet far enough south to have plants and trees growing all year round. This has enabled plant life to survive despite the extremity of human encroachment.

It is easy to forget as we wander through our tree-covered country parks that most of Hong Kong’s mountains were treeless in the 1950s as a result of 19th-century shipbuilding and 20th-century scavenging for wood.

Look at the early photos of Kadoorie Farm on the then-barren northern slopes of Tai Mo Shan. There can be no clearer reminder of the resilience of nature – first to hide and then to heal the harms humans have inflicted – and its ability to sustain so much wildlife that was purged from other global megacities a century or more ago.

What other global city can boast 240 species of butterfly and 130 dragonfly species? Legend has it that Britain’s wild boar population never recovered from Henry III’s Christmas feast in 1251, at which revellers consumed 200 boar, whereas our wild boar population manages to travel on the MTR.

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Culling of wild boars in Hong Kong stirs up citywide public outcry

A second exceptional feature of our location is the abundant seasonal flows from nearby ocean currents. Mixed with the fresh water pouring out of the Pearl River, this has created a rich marine environment not just for fish life, but it also gives us more hard coral species than the Caribbean.

Not even my Cornish sister, who has the Atlantic Ocean on all sides, can boast about bumping into a whale shark, as my neighbours did a few years ago as they were fishing just hundreds of metres offshore from my home in Clear Water Bay.

A further exceptional feature of Hong Kong is the extent of our steep volcanic and granite mountainscapes. Many of them are unscalable, few can be built upon and they often bring impenetrable forests – and the wildlife that occupies them – within tens of metres of high-rise housing blocks.

Most major cities were built on flat terrain that was cleared for people and farming centuries ago, destroying any habitat for wild nature.

A visitor admires the rocks at the Hong Kong National Geopark, now a Unesco Global Geopark, on its opening day on November 3, 2009. The park is made up of eight geo-areas distributed across the Northeast New Territories sedimentary rock region and Sai Kung volcanic rock region. Photo: Ricky Chung

There is a deep paradox here. Hong Kong people are as urban a community as I know. Most are indifferent to and often fearful of the wilderness that survives in our midst.

Many maintain an almost Victorian anxiety about wild, uncontrolled nature. How many of them venture tentatively out into the sun under umbrellas, and only after draping every visible inch of their bodies in UV-protective clothing?

Were it not for quirky, curmudgeonly governors such as MacLehose, I suspect most Hongkongers would not have noticed or cherished our astonishing natural heritage as an essential part of the competitive advantage that underpins our future as one of the world’s leading economies.

I know there is a growing number of Hongkongers who contradict this unkind stereotype. Many of them are returnees from countries such as Canada and Australia, and many more are youngsters who are increasingly anxious about the environmental threats arising from climate change. Some of them recognise that we are seeing more of our wild boar straying into urban Hong Kong in part because we continue to stray into their natural environments.

But these remain a minority. For many, as they have pressed to eat away pockets of our country parks and to create new border communities like that planned for the Northern Metropolis, the thousands of Hong Kong’s protected hectares are simply an encroachment on our scope to develop more urban space.

If it is necessary to capture more land to provide more and better homes for Hong Kong people, then let us do so with extreme care and full knowledge that we compromise our unique natural heritage at our peril. It is an essential part of our competitive advantage – wild boar, Burmese pythons and all.

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view

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