Green groups yesterday slammed the San Tin Technopole’s environmental study, yet the project looks set to continue
The government has deleted an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) dubbed by green groups as the “most careless and sloppy EIA in history”, but hit back at detailed criticism of the report claiming misidentified birds were down to “editing problems” and that all procedures were followed under the new “streamlined” EIA requirements.
A coalition of environmental groups, including the Hong Kong Birdwatching Society, Greenpeace and WWF Hong Kong, had on Wednesday written a joint letter to the Advisory Council on the Environment (ACE), urging the council to reject the EIA at its upcoming Monday meeting.
The groups claim the report is “full of errors” , including 35 procedural violations and “at least 27 technical assessment and data errors”.
One independent expert told Transit Jam the report was “lacking in detail” on “basic things” such as the numbers of birds and how the conditions of individual fish ponds vary which, they said, had a big impact on bird life.
But the government this morning said the report is sound and that no errors affect the validity of the document. It says the consultant team made errors in compiling attachments to the EIA report and the mistakes have since been rectified.
Environmental express
The San Tin EIA was one of the first major EIAs under new “express” guidelines developed by the government and unanimously approved by LegCo in 2023 after a chaotic environmental review process for public housing at the Hong Kong Golf Club.
While activists at the time feared the express EIA system would allow the government to push through development plans with less environmental oversight, the government claimed it was simply streamlining bureaucratic procedures.
“We’re not compromising conservation of the environment in order to build flats,” Secretary for Environment and Ecology Tse Chin-wan told Commercial Radio in 2022. “That’s definitely not the case. But can the [EIA] procedures be done more quickly? Because sometimes we can see they take too long.”
The green groups studying the San Tin EIA say the speed of the EIA process means the report may “seriously underestimate the ecological damage of the development to the wetlands and fish ponds” in the wetland area. They claim getting additional information from the government is like “squeezing toothpaste”.
“It is inappropriate to hastily pass the professional environmental impact assessment report without full discussion by society, so as to avoid causing unprecedented serious damage to this unique wetland in the Greater Bay Area. This will set a very bad precedent that will be followed by other development plans involving wetlands in the northern metropolitan area in the future,” say the groups in their letter to ACE.
The San Tin Technopole project will, according to government sources, permanently destroy about 89 hectares of fishpond habitat with about 63 hectares outside the project boundary suffering indirect disturbance.
Despite criticisms of its environmental due diligence, the government is confident the project will proceed on schedule. Yesterday, Development Secretary Bernadette Linn told LegCo the funding application for the San Tin Technopole’s “first stage site formation and infrastructure works” would be submitted in the second half of 2024
“We look forward to Members’ support to allow the early commencement of the works,” she said.
The Civil Engineering and Development Department (CEDD), who commissioned the EIA, has not yet responded to enquiries on the quality of the report and has deleted the contract award notice from its website: but big money is usually involved – according to Transit Jam’s research, Arup, for example, is being paid $220 million for a 3-year study into the Artificial Islands ending this year, while a cluster of consultants including Arup, Atkins, AECOM and Mott MacDonald regularly scoop up one-off environmental reports or “feasibility studies” for $5-30 million apiece.
