Though much of Hong Kong’s natural environment is protected inside country parks, many valuable conservation areas remain vulnerable and exposed.

Tai Long Sai Wan is one of Hong Kong’s most magnificent natural areas. Tree-clad hills curve around a beautiful bay with shimmering sea. Standing on the wide empty sand, there is silence, except for the crash of the waves. Behind the beach lies an area of lush trees where birds and butterflies flit busily and a few cows laze in long grass.

One day in July 2010, an excavator dug down into a patch of this paradise, tearing up the green grass and threatening to cause irreversible damage. The land had been bought from local villagers by billionaire Simon Lo Lin-shing who planned to develop it for personal use. He could do this because the area was privately owned and so hadn’t been included in the surrounding country park.

Conservationists soon spotted the damage being done and rushed to protect the area. A Facebook group condemning the development gathered over 40,000 members and a petition called on the government to take action. Facing such an outcry, the government responded rapidly and Tai Long Sai Wan was given a Development Permission Area plan preventing unapproved development activities for three years.

The Tai Long Sai Wan incident pointed to the much wider problems that exist for the protection of Hong Kong’s environment. Hong Kong has some very valuable natural areas which are habitats to a staggering amount of species. But many of these areas currently lie outside the country parks protective boundaries and are under threat from developers. Even areas included in protected zones are never completely safe. Management of the areas is often lacking and not conducive to conservation.

Hong Kong is spectacularly rich in nature. It has a greater number of wild species than the UK, which is over 200 times its size. These include 1,920 species of flowering plants and over 2,000 species of moths. Several of these species can be found only in Hong Kong, such as the recently discovered Chinese Grassbird. Many are considered to be of great importance worldwide.

“People may not be aware that Hong Kong has very rich biodiversity,” said Alan Leung, a conservation officer with WWF Hong Kong. “Some of the species are of very high conservation importance, not just locally but globally.”

Protecting such biodiversity is a key concern of the region’s green groups. Last year, Hong Kong also signed on to the Convention on Biological Diversity, increasing its obligation to make efforts to preserve its different species and their habitats.

Hong Kong’s primary means of protecting this biodiversity are the country parks, established in 1976, which seal off areas from development and restrict their use. These parks cover an impressive 41 percent of the territory. But for many conservationists, the problem is that they do not protect the right areas.

Because the parks were formed with the aim of protecting Hong Kong’s water supply, they were located mostly around reservoirs and high-elevation areas. Drawing their boundaries, the government also sought to respect villagers’ rights and so excluded private land.

“This created a situation where there are ecologically diverse areas that weren’t protected,” said Wilson Lau, a researcher at the think tank Civic Exchange who has studied the parks’ effectiveness.

Areas with important lowland habitats, such as feng-shui woodlands and wetlands, are outside their protection. Lau argues this has already affected Hong Kong’s biodiversity, leading to an abundance of species that live in high areas, but a paucity of lowland species.

“Many lowland areas, including many streams, have high conservation value but are not included in country parks,” Leung said. “So from our green group’s point of view, the government should look into this and try to protect those areas.”

Protecting lowland areas is not so straightforward, however, because many are still inhabited or are spaces the government may wish to keep open to future development.

Of the unprotected land, a particular issue is the “enclaves”. These are 77 areas, like Tai Long Sai Wan, surrounded by or adjacent to country parks. They were not originally included in the parks, because they were inhabited and contain privately-owned land. For conservationists, these enclaves contain valuable nature and need to be protected.

“We consider many of those enclaves to have high conservation value and their environment to be integrated into the country park system,” said Leung. “So we think that the government should consider including them into our country parks.”

But many enclaves are still inhabited. Including them in the parks would conflict with these indigenous villagers’ land rights. When the idea was discussed at a Country and Marine Parks Board meeting last year, board member Li Yiu-ban said no landowner would let his property become part of a country park.

“They will lose forever the right to build small houses on their properties,” he said.

Adding to the urgency is the fact that many enclaves are already being developed. In So Lo Pun, a remote village beside Plover Cove Country Park, the WWF reported that four years ago villagers felled 400 feng-shui trees to build a park. The government gave the area a Development Permission Area (DPA) plan in November 2011.

In Tin Fu Tsai, an enclave within Tai Lam Country Park, the WWF reported that in 2009 trees were felled, land excavated and roads built, causing large-scale habitat damage. The government drafted a DPA plan for this enclave in December 2011. Conservationists are racing to get the enclaves protected before development can occur.

“Once development begins, it is irreversible,” said Leung.

Since the Tai Long Sai Wan incident, the government has recognized the urgency of resolving the enclave issue. In 2010 it announced an “enclave policy”, stating that to meet conservation and social needs the enclaves would be assessed on a case-by-case basis and either be included within country parks, or have their use determined through statutory planning.

So far, the Planning Department has largely employed the second option, preparing DPA plans for 19 of the 54 enclaves which before 2010 had no statutory plans. These plans mean development of the enclaves cannot take place without government permission for the next three years.

For conservationists, however, gaining protective zoning for areas is only half the battle. Once areas are protected, Lau says they also need effective management to conserve their biodiversity. His study of Hong Kong’s country parks revealed a lack of any real management taking place.

 “A lot of the time, it felt like it was just ‘as long as it’s green, it’s okay, and things are going well’,” he said, explaining that properly conserving different species requires management and decisions on difficult matters. The Chinese Grassbird, for example, thrives on bare grassy hillsides currently shrinking due to an alternative conservation aim of reforestation.

“You have these conundrums,” he said, “But they (the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department) don’t have the resources to deal with them.”

Lau says the ineffective management of the parks is partly due to lack of funds for conservation, with the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department forced to divide money between conservation and enhancing the parks’ recreational facilities.

Alongside this conservation management, Lau said the current policing of protected areas against illegal usage and development is ineffective. He says there are many cases of infringement, particularly with the dumping of construction waste in protected areas. But the government doesn’t effectively survey these.

“There is an understanding that the government isn’t doing enough in terms of monitoring that kind of phenomenon,” he says. As a result, WWF Hong Kong has taken it upon itself to monitor parks with its ‘Wall Of Destruction’. In April, an Audit Commission report on the policing of government land also suggested the government was ineffectual when it came to detecting infringements.

“Audit found that most of the land control cases were detected as a result of media reports and complaints from members of the public,” the report said. “Only a small percentage of the cases were identified during the District Land Offices patrols. Owing to the absence of regular inspections ... the Lands Department could not always detect such unlawful acts in a timely manner and could not grasp the magnitude of the problem.”

Responding to the report, the then secretary for development Carrie Lam said monitoring government land, particularly that in the New Territories, was not always straightforward and placed considerable demands on resources.

“Government sites are spread all over the New Territories and this has made it impracticable for the Lands Department to patrol them regularly,” she said in the report. “For the effective use of the public resources allocated to the Lands Department, acting mainly on complaints (including media reports) is a reasonable approach.”

Even when infringement is noticed, action is not guaranteed. The Audit Commission report also revealed that a fun park had been allowed illegally to occupy almost 5,000 square metres of Tai Lam Country Park for the past 18 years. The Lands Department first noticed the site in 1993, and sent numerous warning letters, but the park failed to close it down.

After the report drew attention to the infringement, the department finally took action, tearing down several structures on May 24. In a public hearing to discuss the report, Lands Department chief Annie Tam Kam-lan attributed the site’s prolonged occupation to a mistake by a department member who failed to pass the case to a task force.

Lau said this case offered an example of the government’s ineffective handling of illegal usage of country parks. “Enforcement of that kind of activity isn’t very effective,” he said.

The Audit Commission report similarly criticized the Lands Department’s lackluster approach to policing infringements, stating: “Cases of prolonged, unlawful occupation of government land may be seen as a result of the Lands Department’s lack of determination in taking enforcement.”

The report found there were 6,381 outstanding land control cases, of which 494 were classified as ‘high priority’. Of the high priority cases, 70 percent had not been resolved within the four month target period, while another four was unresolved for more than a decade.

The Lands Department said outstanding cases were often located where the land was difficult to access, where land control would affect houses, or where they faced legal challenges. The Director Of Lands agreed to consider the report’s recommendations for improving policing of government land.

“The District Lands Offices and the New Territories Action Team will explore measures to expedite land control action,” she said.

For Leung, the government needs to do more to stop illegal use of the parks. “The government is not doing its job very effectively,” he said. “We want adequate resources to control this.”

The reason management of the parks is not better, Lau says, is partly due to a sense of complacency about conservation in Hong Kong. When assessing the effectiveness of protecting nature in the region, the government could always point to the area covered.

“My impression is that the government feels like it is doing a really good job already on nature conservation,” he said. “Because if you look at the statistics: 40 percent of Hong Kong’s land mass is country parks, so they always go back to that. It gives an excuse to be complacent and not make the management of the parks more effective.”

 On the surface it appears things are going well. Looking around Hong Kong reveals huge areas of thriving green space, much contained within country park boundaries, and an abundance of wildlife and natural beauty.

But go beneath the surface and it becomes apparent much of the region’s important natural diversity is ineffectively managed or is located outside protected areas, leaving it immensely vulnerable. In July 2010, as excavators bit down into the green ground of Tai Long Sai Wan, they offered a wake-up call as to just how vulnerable it is.