Hong Kong will take stock of its efforts to adapt to extreme weather brought about by a warming planet, in order to assess its resilience to the effects of climate change, the environment undersecretary said ahead of an international climate conference.
Undersecretary Christine Loh Kung-wai said the city needed to understand its long-term preparedness and where the risks lay as the earth's atmosphere changed.
"We need to find out where we stand in resilience, and where the gaps are," Loh told reporters at a media luncheon yesterday.
An examination of the city's prior efforts would help the government understand what actions it must take and what hardware it still needed, she said.
Some of those efforts include enlarged sea walls to deal with rising sea levels and measures to prevent landslides associated with increased rainfall.
"Every term of government should be ready to review these actions … every five or 10 years," she said.
The three-day conference, titled Urban Adaptation to Climate Change: Building Resilience in Hong Kong and Asian Cities, begins next Thursday.
During the conference, eight government departments including civil engineering, drainage and health will give a joint presentation on Hong Kong's adaptation efforts to participants from various countries.
Loh hailed it as an "unprecedented" attempt, adding that representatives of major utilities such as power, the airport and railways would also attend the conference.
Chinese University Professor Gabriel Lau Ngar-cheung, who co-authored the fifth report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, outlined key aspects of climate threats facing cities around the world, including more storms of hurricane forces, rising sea levels and the spread of infectious diseases.
"Even [if] we stop emitting greenhouse gases now, we are still unable to avoid these threats," said Lau, who is the director of the university's Institute of Environment, Energy and Sustainability. "But the earlier we plan for this, the less costly the catastrophes will be for us."
Lau said Pearl River Delta cities like Dongguan and Shunde were prone to flooding from a major storm surge combined with rising sea levels.
Apart from Hong Kong representatives, John Curtin, director of Incident Management at the UK's Environment Agency, will talk about their experiences in dealing with the nation's worst flood in decades last year. Representatives from the Philippines will also share their experiences from the superstorm in Tacloban last year.