‘Carbon trading can help HK achieve green goals’

The head of an environmental group says Hong Kong should have a carbon trading scheme if it wants to achieve its goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.

William Yu, CEO of the World Green Organisation, said the initiatives pledged by Chief Executive Carrie Lam in Wednesday’s Policy Address were ‘positive’. They include ending the use of coal in electricity generation by 2035 and encouraging bus companies to go electric.

Speaking on RTHK’s Hong Kong Today programme on Friday, Yu said going carbon neutral was challenging, and a voluntary scheme where polluters buy carbon credits, or reduce their emissions, was effective.

“We should establish a voluntary carbon-trading scheme in Hong Kong,” he told RTHK’s Samantha Butler. “The transaction size may be small, so we need to involve the Greater Bay Area to get this done.

“So how we can encourage the corporations in Hong Kong to get involved is that they have the need to buy carbon credits, so we need to set up this kind of trading in order to help them to source carbon credits for offsetting carbon emissions”

Speaking on a special programme on RTHK on Friday, Lam said the government would on Friday afternoon unveil its Climate Action Plan 2050, which details ambition targets for carbon emissions, as well as mitigation strategies to deal with the consequences of global warming.