IN THE SPOTLIGHT
building in Hong Kong. In particular, CIC assigned HKGBC to operate the CIC’s Green Product Certification to assess sustainable building and construction materials. Another CIC-funded initiative is the Hong Kong Green Building Week, organised annually to educate the public about Green building. It includes various programmes such as mock mini-LegCo debate for students to raise public awareness of Green buildings.
Starting from 1 April 2011, undergoing BEAM Plus assessment has become one of the conditions for private developments to obtain GFA concessions for Green and amenity features. As a result, there has been a sharp increase in the number of registered projects annually, from an average of 16 projects from 1996 to 2010 to an average of about 140 presently. Thus far, the number of Green buildings certified by HK-BEAM/BEAM Plus has exceeded 2,300, and the cumulative GFA certified has exceeded 28 million square-metres.
If one walks across the city, it would be easy to realise that the building industry has started to shift towards more environmentally friendly buildings. This is reflected by the increasing popularity of vertical greening, photovoltaic system, and various energy andwater saving measures in new building projects. According to HKGBC’s statistics, as of 2019, total amount of carbon reduction from BEAM Plus-assessed projects, compared to the baseline, is 625,400 tons per year. This is equivalent to the planting of 27 million trees.
What are the challenges on implementing Green building standards in Hong Kong? HKGBC started to accept registrations for BEAM Plus in 2010. We have run the scheme for nearly 11 years. In these 11 years, the total number of BEAM Plus registrations we received amounts to more than 1,700, reflecting the large amount of support from the industry. Of these, nearly 1,400 are from new building developments whereas nearly 300 are from existing buildings.
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Jockey Club Innovation Tower, certified with BEAM Plus Final Gold
Image by Vanzyst/Shutterstock
To achieve the target set by the Hong Kong government for carbon net-zero by 2050, our challenge is how to move this further and lead the industry to approach closer to carbon neutrality. This means that more zero-carbon or super-low-energy building design have to be adopted.
It can be seen that we have been able to achieve a relatively high number of registrations from new building projects. Looking into the ratings these projects achieved, about 45 per cent of these projects obtained a rating at Gold or above, despite the fact that there is currently no regulatory requirement to achieve such a high rating. This reflects that a lot of new building developers are keen to do better than the minimum.
To achieve the target set by the Hong Kong government for carbon net-zero by 2050, our challenge is how to move this further and lead the industry to approach closer to carbon neutrality. This means that more zero-carbon or super-low-energy building design have to be adopted.
The majority of buildings in Hong Kong are high-rise. The biggest hurdle of this type of buildings is the lack of sufficient roof area to install renewable energy installations such as solar panels and wind turbines to achieve a net-zero energy performance. Another problem faced by Hong Kong is the high-density urban environment where buildings are built close to one another. On the other side, Hong Kong’s subtropical climate and high humidity in spring and summer almost dictate the needs for air-conditioning usage in all types of buildings. Therefore, meeting the cooling demand for buildings is a significant challenge in Hong Kong.
Apart, we have a large number of existing buildings which consume 90 per cent of electricity and are serviced
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