Hongkongers ‘complacent’ over water supply risks

An engineer said on Friday that the government needs to look for alternative water supplies as well as increasing awareness of water conservation in the local population amid warnings of drought in the river that supplies most of Hong Kong’s fresh water.

Albert Lai from the Professional Commons made the comments on RTHK’s Hong Kong Today programme after Shenzhen and Guangzhou authorities warned of severe water shortages because of continuing drought in the Dongjiang, or East River.

Lai said authorities in the SAR could put more effort into fixing leaky pipes, as well as speeding up construction of desalination plants.

“Because of climate change, we will be seeing more and more of this severe drought in future decades,” he told RTHK’s Samantha Butler. “At the moment, as a population, we are pretty complacent because we thought that we are protected by this water supply agreement from Guangdong.

“But in fact, if you look at what we call total water resource management, since we are under the same watershed as these big cities, for 40 million people, if that watershed is in trouble then Hong Kong will be in trouble too.”

An official notice issued this week said the inflow of water into the East River Basin, a major supply of water for Shenzhen and Guangzhou, will remain at around 50 to 60 percent of its usual level into next spring.

Some 70 percent of Hong Kong’s fresh water supplies come from the Dongjiang under an agreement dating back to 1965.