What matters most? How COVID-19 may help re-align Hongkongers values and motivations towards sustainability
COVID-19 has struck hard on Hong Kong and exposed the weakness in systemic capacities to respond to vast spreading outbreaks of such kind. While foremost affecting citizens’ health bearing high degrees of fatality rates, COVID-19 has also painfully demonstrated how individual freedoms had to be limited forcing local residents to rearrange everyday life, particularly in terms of values and behaviours about consumption and social interactions. When evaluated from a sustainable development perspective, the alleviated ecological impact is good news. Yet, the crucial question is whether this momentum will last or if patterns of consumption and production will return to a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario.
While everyday practices very much follow particular habitual patterns, the caesura generated by COVID-19, has forced Hongkongers to essentially change their routines to adjust to the challenging conditions. By virtue of routinization and habituation, new patterns of reduced, potentially more sustainable consumption may have emerged and might become ingrained in people’s everyday life.
Based on the substantial adjustment of everyday life that occurred since the COVID-19 outbreak in Hong Kong, we see a particular potential to identify valuable – in the sense of sustainable development – value and behaviour changes that could be used for promulgating a more sustainable lifestyle among Hong Kong citizenry.
With the support of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Hong Kong Limited, HKUST Institute for the Environment (HKUST-IENV) and Division of Environment and Sustainability (HKUST-ENVR) is conducting this project to understand the long-term impacts of the “new normal” alongside Hongkongers' new values and behaviours, and the influences of these impacts on Hong Kong’s sustainable development.