Hong Kong Developers Threaten Bird Sanctuary With New High Rises
The city’s vast wetland, crucial to birdlife and the fight against climate change, could be under threat from development on its edges.
An expansive area of wetland in Hong Kong that is environmentally critical is coming under threat, as developers desperate for land in the world’s most unaffordable housing market plan to build tall apartment blocks near the protected area.
The sprawling marshes and fishponds in Hong Kong’s northwest, bordering the Chinese tech hub of Shenzhen, provide foraging and roosting grounds for hundreds of bird species, including the threatened Black-Faced Spoonbill and Saunders’s Gull. At more than four times the size of New York City’s Central Park, the reserve is also a carbon reservoir that is crucial in the fight against climate change and could help alleviate flooding during typhoon season.