Stakeholders’ interview
Interview with External Stakeholder
As a government department, ArchSD plays a unique role in helping stakeholders accelerate their sustainability development. We are grateful to invite Mr. Wong Kam Sing, an industry professional and former Secretary for the Environment, to share his insights on sustainability in construction and strategies to move forward on our decarbonisation journey.
Mr. WONG Kam Sing, GBS, JP
Former Secretary for the Environment
ArchSD’s Role in
Decarbonisation
WONG KAM SING
I appreciate how ArchSD is leading the industry with the adoption of advanced construction technologies such as promoting MiC. This construction method can increase quality and reduce waste and carbon emissions of building projects. It is a more adaptive method to cope with extreme weather conditions, such as heatwaves, creating a more resilient working environment to promote health, safety and well-being of workers.
Our Response
We fully recognise our role and duties in improving the climate adaptive capacity and resilience of our city. Facing the challenges of climate change, we will continue to go beyond and above statutory levels and green building industry standards by applying green and high productivity construction technologies, in order to support Hong Kong in achieving carbon neutrality.
WONG KAM SING
In order to combat climate change, ArchSD may develop their own climate change framework as a showcase to encourage the industry to join the decarbonisation journey and strive for carbon neutralisation in Hong Kong.
Our Response
We are actively supporting the carbon neutrality journey, and will launch our ArchSD Carbon Neutrality Strategic Framework in 2024. This framework aims to inspire our industry partners to co-create a carbon neutral and more sustainable future.
WONG KAM SING
I encourage ArchSD to set proactive examples through its Value Chain to mobilise stakeholders in the industry to engage in climate action.
ArchSD can also explore and collaborate with other government departments to adopt green building designs and to promote more to the public. Frameworks, guidelines or checklists can be developed to encourage vendors, suppliers and business partners to adopt more environmental features in new building designs.
Our Response
We have multi-pronged approaches to encourage stakeholders in the whole value chain to act together on the sustainability journey. At corporate level, we have various pragmatic stakeholder communication channels to advocate sustainable design and green building initiatives. At project levels, we have set up project environmental design checklist to facilitate project team members, including clients, consultants and contractors, to develop green strategies for individual projects based on the project own unique nature.
We also include incentive scheme in our tenders to encourage contractors to adopt more environmental features in new building designs.
We will keep working hand-in-hand with all stakeholders and continue to develop and support wider adoptions of green and low carbon building initiatives in the industry.
WONG KAM SING
For the general public, more engagement programmes can be organised to raise their awareness of sustainability and collect more views in developing people-centric designs.
Our Response
We have supported organising multiple green activities to raise public awareness of environmental protection and introduce green building designs in our building projects, such as the Public Architecture School Interchange Workshop. We have also collaborated with our client departments and industry partners to promote sustainable building designs to the public and collect their views through various engagement programmes, such as the “Design Idea Competition for Wan Chai Community Green Station” and “POSsible! Public Open Space Design Lab”.
ArchSD will continue to organise and support a wide range of stakeholder engagement programmes to promote sustainability across multiple sectors.
