This is definitely one of the most wonderful Expos and sessions I have ever attended featuring the green transformation. Thanks to the coordination of my colleagues in Hong Kong, I participated in a panel discussion featuring “Unlocking the Potential of a Sustainable Blue Economy” (SBE) in Sustainable Business Forum (“ReThink”), on Sept. 13th in Hong Kong Convention Centre.
Mr. Alistair Monument, our conservation director of Asia Pacific acted as the moderator. I took three questions during the panel and clearly expressed our advocacies and some of my thinking toward this idea.
To the first question, I introduced two of our on-going work, ocean accounting in the Greater Bay Area and the China Blue Taxonomy. The former should be finalized next month. I introduced the latter as 8 sectors for SBE, 5 aspect for each industrial sector, and 3 years to develop and review. I have been talking about this for many times in many occasions.
For the second question on what should we do to fill the gap of SBE, I mentioned three ways.
Awareness raising. For the first time, I summarize the core value of SBE into the three key words – S-B-E. Sustainable, or the profit in a long-term investment, lies in the welfare of local community and human benefits in a whole. Blue represents positive impact on ocean ecosystem, at least not negative. Economy recognizes the necessity for development, but should take into account of renewable energy of green criteria.
Top down. As many financial institutes in mainland China are state owned, it is crucial to convince the policy makers and supervisory departments to issue favorable policies or standards, even they might be voluntary. Some banking staff may already be ready to innovate and transform. Such policies and guidance will enable that once they want to make any change, their supervisors won’t say no.
Bottom up. There is a mismatch between conservationists like us and investors. We conservationists are the ones that know nature, but most of us are just unable to translate our work to messages that investors can understand. Some investors already realized the need of sustainability, but their expertise on revenue models or balance sheets does not help. So we are trying to develop tools to fill in the gap, one example is the sustainable fishery inventory we are developing.
The third question was about the opportunities that Hong Kong could make use of for developing SBE. I saw HK’s strength as the combination of a well-established marine industry, full elements of finance (trading house and free markets), and knowledgeable investors. Therefore, HK could be a laboratory for SBE. When we develop standards or mechanisms, we may TestFlight here. And the market may tell us what works and what not.
I was quite encouraged, that after our session, several professional audience approached me and told me that what I said was especially helpful. And of course, I do hope some of the audience would appreciate our efforts and support us in the future, either by following our advocacies or fund us for future development of SBE.
The main pity was that our panel is disastrously gender unbalanced, as all five on the stage were male. Fortunately, the opening remarks and most keynote speeches were made by female speakers.