GIFT at Work, Chandran Nair: Air quality
Individual responsibility is the key to Hong Kong working towards cleaning its skies of pollution, Chandran Nair told a current affairs programme looking into air quality in the SAR.

The need to take action was especially pressing since, “on one level, Hong Kong has very little choice”, he told The Pearl Report, which airs weekly on Hong Kong TVB Pearl.

Mr Nair, founder and chief executive of GIFT, was speaking in his capacity of the Convenor of the Council for Sustainable Development’s Better Air Quality Support Group.

Despite the urgency, he emphasised that “there are many things that you can do … in terms of reducing emissions”.

“We are already looking at electronic road pricing as one means of doing this,” he said, referring to a suite of three measures being explored as part of a public engagement process on air quality being conducted by the Council.

In addition to road pricing, the engagement is to have the public explore and debate how best to manage the sources and behaviour that cause pollution on days of high air pollution and demand side management, another measure that influences energy use behaviour.

“A lot of people think a lot of these issues are someone else’s problem,” he said. “They think it’s the Government’s problem, [or] the power-sector’s problem. If we want to reduce pollution at the source, from the electricity sector, then we all have a responsibility.”

Be that as it may, Mr Nair said “the public needs to understand that some of these things will affect them”. They will need to weigh up whether they are willing to accept the effect that the three engagement process issues will have on their lives.

He emphasised that the engagement process was “not a government consultation”.

“The thing that we’re trying to do is not [to] be proscriptive and say, ‘Here is what we want to do, please tell us if you agree’,” Mr Nair said.

“It’s more a case of saying, ‘We have these issues in Hong Kong and what should we do about demand-side management [for example] to increase energy efficiency.”

“If we are serious about air pollution in Hong Kong, the public too needs to understand that some of these things will affect them. On one level Hong Kong has very little choice, as we have to take action,” he said.

Separately, Mr Nair said that it was important to understand that the specific focus of the engagement did not constitute the entire campaign to improve air quality both in Hong Kong and across the boundary, which, with industrial and power sectors at the heart of the “world’s factory”, has been the focus of much attention and concern.

The report, “Who’s air is it, anyway?”, by Patrick Fok also explored action being taken at the community and scientific levels and looked briefly at a road charging scheme running in London.