The investors who excitedly bought into the SpaceX IPO, making Elon Musk a trillionaire, have implicitly made a prediction on the future. The company’s US$1.8 trillion valuation is based on the expectation that its AI business will have revenues of US$322 billion by 2030 – which is quite an eyebrow-raising prediction, given that 2025 revenues were 100 times lower, US$3.2 billion. Server racks in data centres. Photo: Brett Sayles, via Pexels. In other five-year predictions, the World Meteorological Organization expects one of the next five years to break the record for highest temperature in recorded history; slightly less of an eyebrow raising prediction, given that the past 11 years have also been the hottest on record and global temperatures do seem to be heading in the same direction as those rocket ships.
Just as the SpaceX engineers have a lot of work to do on a short deadline to truly earn their yachts, humanity has a lot of work to do to avoid an unending succession of increasingly inhospitable weather: carbon emissions need to be cut in half in the next five years. Actually, because it’s June, make that four and a half years; that’s 10 per cent of the runway gone.
It’s not just climate scientists and rocket ship companies that plan five years ahead. China’s method of planning for the long term in five-year chunks has resulted in an economic miracle; and Hong Kong is now getting in on that action with a five-year plan of its own. There’s a public consultation , deadline August 14, for Hongkongers to contribute their thoughts on what they hope to see incorporated into the plan. The public consultation on The First Five-Year Plan for the Economic and Social Development of Hong Kong (2026-2030). Photo: GovHK. In my last article , I hoped that Hong Kong’s five-year plan would take a leaf from China’s book, and incorporate sustainability considerations right into the heart of all decision-making. That doesn’t seem to have been done yet, but, well, we have until August 14 to politely ask.
As much as it’s trite for a columnist to pontificate about AI, there’s something we can learn about how corporates are thinking about AI. CEOs spend time, effort and capital in building out AI expertise and infrastructure, and in making difficult decisions about “ lower value human capital. ” Predicting how AI will shake things up in the next five years is not simply left to a nerd in an IT dungeon to think about, it is seriously considered at the highest levels of corporate strategy. CEOs are busy making plans now in order to prevent competitor robots eating their lunches in five years’ time. Even though we have credible predictions that rising sea levels are soon going to be eating our coastlines, sustainability still tends to be the domain of hippies in a sustainability dungeon (often, weirdly, subordinated to a marketing department and while some companies are doing better than others, it’s still quite common for CEOs to leave sustainability to the hippies rather than integrating it into their own strategy work.
Looking at the Hong Kong five-year plan public consultation document, that seems to be true for top-level decision-making in government too; which is a particular shame given how well the China five-year plans have incorporated sustainability.
The translation of the Chinese five-year plan that I am reading features references to “green development” or other related terms in almost every chapter. For example, Chapter 31, Section 3, “建设现代化人民城市” (“Building a Modern People’s City”), specifically mentions the need to “[p]romote green and low-carbon urban development,” as well as making references to sustainable construction and flood prevention. Lamma power station. File photo: Tom Grundy/HKFP. By contrast, the Hong Kong public consultation document chapter on the Northern Metropolis does not mention carbon reduction or flood adaptation at all. It does say the word “green” twice, but with no specifics on what that means.
We need to turn to page 31 (out of 37) to get a clue on what is considered “green.” In fairness, there’s some good stuff in there. Zero carbon energy, green transport, circular economy, all important aspects of sustainability. The green living section even mentions “the integrated development of culture, sports, and tourism, green transition and security governance as key pillars for strengthening the city’s competitiveness and people’s sense of satisfaction” (emphasis added).
Perhaps I am splitting hairs, but I see a contradiction in mentioning “integrated development” only in the twilight paragraphs of a document; the term “integrated” means to me something closer to how China’s five-year plan integrates sustainability into every strategic pillar. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why China is so far ahead of the rest of the world in green technology – it’s a strategy, not an afterthought. Hong Kong’s five-year plan has some great material, but silos it off into a separate chapter. The trouble with having it in a silo is that it often leads to different departments pulling in different directions; like trying to decarbonise transport, while cancelling electric car incentive schemes and subsidising diesel .
If anything, I hope that Hong Kong’s first five-year plan will be the catalyst to embed sustainability in big picture planning, just like China’s national planning does. We have until August 14 to ask. [Table]
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