Green biodiversity finance is a fast-emerging area in green finance with increasing interest from investors and issuers globally. It highly values biodiversity and addresses pressing climate challenges by supporting the transition to green production, contributing to economic growth, improving people’s livelihood, protecting ecosystems, deploying nature-based climate solutions and assuring bio-capacity balance. As Hong Kong currently has a high ecological footprint, sustainable development with solid climate resilience will undoubtedly emerge from new strategies. These new strategies will seriously influence green biodiversity finance to effectively achieve resource recovery.
Green biodiversity finance is essential to human life through provision of quality ecosystem services, green food, oxygen, bio-capacity balance and climate regulation. The concept of bio-capacity tracks the capacity of ecosystems to produce renewable resources and ecological services for human needs. According to WWF, Hong Kong’s demand for ecological resources and services exceeds 150 times the local bio-capacity. As such, setting a participatory holistic vision of financial strategies is imperative for creativity, green innovation and ecosystems valorisation.
Accordingly, engineers’ role consists of multidisciplinary green biodiversity design, technological innovation, planning and implementation with sustainability mindset throughout engineering processes. Green finance projects underway provide engineers with opportunities to qualitatively improve the assessment, tracking and reporting of biodiversity valorisation strategies. Moreover, in current context of data gaps, persistent inconsistencies and biodiversity harmful, specific responsibilities of engineers lie in:
- Contributing to identify, assess and track public and private finance that harm biodiversity within engineering projects;
- Incorporating ecosystem conservation strategies in all project planning and sectorial studies through consistent and transparent green biodiversity design with further granularity;
- Improving knowledge sharing on green biodiversity finance certification by developing a web-based engineering framework, information hub and centralised database to identify key ecosystem services for climate action; and
- Developing guidance and measures to evaluate the effectiveness of green biodiversity finance flows with related essential policy reforms.
In sum, the multidisciplinary commitment of engineers to green biodiversity finance momentum through constructive partnerships on flourishing and innovative waves is the key for climate resilience and real sustainability in Hong Kong.
This article is contributed by Ir Dr Alex Gbaguidi with the coordination of the Environmental Division.