Strategic Environmental Assessment- Hong Kong Experience

Hong Kong is one of the first Asian cities/regions to apply Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) to major development plans. This paper shares the two decades of SEA experience in Hong Kong. In 1988, the Hong Kong Government issued a revised administrative circular to require new town developments and major land use/development proposals to conduct environmental assessment and this represents the first application of SEA for spatial planning in Hong Kong. The Territories Development Strategic Review completed in 1995 was the first major government plan to undergo a comprehensive SEA in Hong Kong. The SEA resulted in the government’s decision to explore sustainable development for Hong Kong. In 2004, the Environmental Protection Department of Hong Kong Government published the Hong Kong SEA Manual and in 2005 launched the SEA Knowledge Centre website. The website not only includes an interactive version of the SEA Manual, the local examples of SEA reports, study briefs, environmental outcomes but also information on the global environmental evaluations of policies and proposals, international web resources, links to other SEA knowledge centres, SEA practices in Mainland China, etc. With about 20 years of SEA experience, there has been increasing environmental awareness in the community and more and more requests from the public and environmental concerned groups to have wider application of SEA and potential broadening the scope to cover sustainability issues. The experience reflected the iterative and interactive dimensions of SEA in serving its purposes of facilitating options development; supporting informed public engagement and decision making; and having environmental gains