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Our News
Fixing the holes: the need to repair Hong Kong’s country park system
When the Country Park system was created it was imperfect, with a number of areas containing villages or agricultural land left out of the parks. These “holes” became the Country Park enclaves. To date, 12 of these enclaves have been deliberately damaged or destroyed to prevent conservation and to “prepare the land” for development.
Altogether, there are 77 enclaves, many of which contain villages and sizeable areas of private land. For many years, these enclaves have remained untouched due to their remoteness. Due to rises in population, urbanization and land prices, the situation has recently changed. To date, 12 of these enclaves have been deliberately damaged or destroyed to prevent conservation and to “prepare the land” for development.
The Tai Long Sai Wan incident – in which a developer bought and partially destroyed a large piece of land in an area of high scenic value – was a turning point. Public outcry over the desecration of this beautiful site caused the government to give consideration to better protecting the enclaves. The result was the revision of the criteria for Country Parks designation in 2011 allowing the incorporation of enclaves containing villages and private land into Country Parks.
Since then, the government has back-tracked. Enclaves that are of high conservation value and under the greatest threat from private developers, i.e. those containing private land, have now been deemed “too difficult to manage” as part of Country Parks. Instead, planning controls are being used and the vast majority of the draft Outline Zoning Plans (OZPs) produced for Country Park enclaves have a large “Village Type Development” or “V” zone, which effectively gives a green light to large scale housing development within the enclaves.
The most recent case of enclave destruction was in Lo Shue Tin, an enclave already covered by an OZP. Between 2010 and 2013, Kantex Development Limited bought 29 of 43 lots for a total of $104 million. Following this purchase, land clearance was carried out in 2013. Mature secondary forest that was contiguous with forested areas in the surrounding Ma On Shan Country Park was bulldozed, freshwater marshes were flattened or drained, and a section of a stream was transformed into a channel. Many threatened species including the Globally Endangered Chinese pangolin and the Short-legged toad, as well as the locally rare Grey scrub hopper butterfly have been affected.
Property developers continue to buy up private land in Country Park enclaves, seeking permission to develop, which will bring them huge profits. The main hurdle they face is the high conservation value of the Country Park enclaves, which creates a perverse incentive to destroy nature and make the land “worthless for conservation”.
There have already been 10 cases of willful destruction that can be linked to private developers. Meanwhile, the government appears to be rewarding this kind of eco-vandalism by zoning private land bought by developers as “Village Type Development”. Often, this land has a recent history of destruction.
To demonstrate that the government cares about the integrity of our world-class Country Park system, values our precious natural heritage and is truly the defender of the public interest; it needs to follow through on its commitment to look carefully at each and every enclave and protect areas of high conservation value by incorporating them into Country Parks as soon as possible.