Hong Kong Airport Authority, conservation department urged to work together on white dolphins after disparate data
- Annual population surveys conducted by the two bodies routinely deliver vastly different results
- The surveys help gauge the impacts of the airport’s third runway construction project on the endangered dolphins
Hong Kong’s environmental watchdog has urged two government agencies to cooperate on monitoring the population of endangered Chinese white dolphins after years of separate surveys from both agencies threw up wildly different estimates.
Members of the Advisory Council on the Environment made the suggestion following a meeting with representatives from the Airport Authority on the implementation of measures to mitigate the environmental impact of Hong Kong’s third runway project.
“Even though the Airport Authority and the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department were using the same methodology, the two departments reached very different results,” council chairman Stanley Wong Yuen-fai said.
“Therefore we think this is a very good opportunity to examine how these two departments can work together to allow us to have a more accurate grasp on the numbers of Chinese white dolphins.”
While the Airport Authority’s study last year had estimated there were only 40 of the dolphins in the waters around Lantau Island, where the airport is located, the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department had placed its estimate at 52. The authority had counted 71 in 2017 and 77 in 2018, while by comparison, the department counted 47 and 32, respectively.
Peter Lee Chung-tang, the Airport Authority’s general manager of sustainability, said the variation could be due to the two groups collecting data on different dates. “But the dolphin numbers fluctuate year to year, so it is hard to make any observation just on one year’s numbers,” he said.
