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undesirable environment and thus making the job of maintenance more difficult for the USD. Actually the Urban Services Department has been taken up responsibility of maintaining trees in the urban area. However, we must improve our situation in terms of manpower resources and professional training because these are all important factors in greening the urban environment.
In fact, to strengthen our greening work, apart from the technical problems, we must have a continuous on-going programme on greening the environment and the function of this programme must involve coordination and promotion. By coordination, I mean that the restructuring of existing work and to launch territory-wide greening work in a more coordinative manner. And this involves coordination with other government departments, District Boards, Territory Development Departments. And in terms of promotion, actually the Urban Council could consider making 1993 the year of greening so as to actively promote a 'Greening Hong Kong Campaign' and also educate the public on the importance of greening their environment, and mobilise the public in participating in greening the environment and make them more aware of environmental education or conservation and also beautifying the environment.
The Urban Council could also take the initiative of attaching more emphasis on greening the environment, strengthening the coordination between greening and architecture, in the course of constructing its recreational and amenities facilities. Actually the sitting out areas, parks under the Recreation Select Committee have been attached a lot of importance too. And last year this Council has already planted 15 000 trees and this has spent a great achievements. We have also planted hundreds of thousands of shrubs and creepers. If we are to strengthen the scale of the work we must play a more important role in the greening work and this Council must launch a comprehensive greening programme and must arrange more senior level staff members to be responsible for the programme. In terms of resource deployment, we must attach it as one of our priorities in our future work. In promoting this greening programme, I suggest that a permanent working group be set up to monitor the progress of this programme. I hope that my colleagues would support this proposal and also express their precious views on this.
Greening the environment I believe is the dream of myself and a lot of my colleagues. I hope that this dream would become true. This Council should consider taking the lead and calling upon government departments, District Boards and the general public to pay more attention to our environment and to attach more importance in greening the environment and how the quality of living can be improved and to take actual action in greening Hong Kong. This is my motion.
MR. JASON YUEN KING-YUK (in English):—I rise to second the motion moved by the Hon. MAN Sai-Cheong and would like to give a few words of deliberation on the subject as follows:—
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Hong Kong is indeed no longer a cultural desert but lamentably remains a huge mass of concrete jungle, with high-rise development spreading from the coasts to mid-levels, from the Central to the remote corners of the city. At best, our major parks (e.g. The Hong Kong Park, Victoria Park, Kowloon Park and the Morse Park...), under the shadow of tall buildings, serve only as sporadic patches of urban lungs. At worst, certain stretches of industrial areas or old urban areas are found even without a single tree. If high-rise development together with the horizontal spread of urban growth is the inevitable destiny for our modern city, then a comprehensive programme of planting trees and greening the city should be of vital importance to our survival, as the greening effect will soften up the harsh and rigid concrete surroundings and will bring back life and fresh air to our micro-environment where we carry out our daily works and lead our daily life.
Technically, when we say 'Green' or 'Greening', it should not be taken just superficially as merely covering our football pitches with artificial plastic turfing, filling our ponds with fibre-glass moulded artificial rocks, and painted or paved all the extensive hard landscape surfaces in our recreational and amenity areas with green colours..., all but for administrative and maintenance convenience, as all these excessive artificial treatments could build up to interrupt the original natural habitats of birds, insects, worms and micro-organisms of the place which are part of the larger ecological cycle of the area.
On the contrary, we need as much natural flora and fauna of wide range of species and colours as possible in our parks, recreational and amenity areas. We need a comprehensive and strategic beautification programme for greening our spaghetti flyovers, slopes, retaining walls, civic spaces and pedestrian footpaths, etc. and that the programme should be executed with high consciousness of ecology and professional landscaping skill and that our micro-climatic conditions in the urban areas should be well taken care of.
'Greening Hong Kong' is in fact nothing new, as it is well stated in Section 'S' of the Council's 'Policy Manual' as one of the Council's duties for a long time. All it needs is the 'steam' for the Council as a mechanism for its implementation when the growth rate of square meterage of tall buildings is constantly faster than the rate of our annual number of trees planted symbolically. We need to expand our nurseries; we need to up-grade the horticultural section of the Department; we should also support the Department to engage its own in-house professional landscape architects and ecologists.
Having been entrusted to manage and maintain practically all the urban open space, the Council should be the 'Greening Authority' in the urban areas in reality if not yet in legislation. The existing designated open space under Council's control is 435 hectares with another 143 hectares under planning for the next 5 years. The West Kowloon and Central and Wan Chai Reclamation Programme of the Metro Plan shall give the Council another challenge of an
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