In February, when Tatler visited Mai Po, which borders Shenzhen, a haze blurred the contours of the buildings across the Sham Chun River. “That’s probably not smog—it can be just fog caused by different weather conditions,” he explains.

While Guangdong, which has long been known for the smog and water pollution caused by its factories, has seen major improvements in the past decade, pollution remains a major issue in Hong Kong, threatening its wildlife. “Shenzhen now has a much better system in place to control its factory discharge.”

By comparison, Hong Kong’s waterways don’t have a sophisticated pollution control system. “If you go to the northwest New Territories, you can smell where the rivers are [because of their pungent smell]; and our coral reefs and the very diverse marine biodiversity that they support have been badly impacted by unsustainable overfishing and water pollution, especially from the 1970s to the late 1990s,” he says. “We still have a lot of room for improvement.”

Given that the branch of the international green group he helms is in a metropolis, Chan understands the need to find a balance between conservation and development, even if his approach to conservation is centred largely around nature-based solutions. “It’s about the protection, sustainable management and restoration of nature and modified ecosystems,” he explains. “These solutions must also have direct human benefits in terms of economy or health.”

He points out that in the 6,000 years since human settlement was first recorded, Hong Kong has lost all its primary forests. “Basically, the whole of Hong Kong has been modified [by our ancestors] one way or another. What you see in country parks are regenerated secondary forests.” This isn’t entirely bad: it is evidence of the potential for restoring other natural habitats— streams, rivers and coral reefs—which would benefit the spectrum of the city’s diverse and unique local wildlife, not only Chinese white dolphins.

There is hope for Hong Kong’s wildlife while there are still relatively healthy breeding populations of different animals. For instance, in the 380 hectares of Mai Po reserve managed by WWF, the gei wai—manmade shrimp-breeding ponds—natural freshwater ponds, inter-tidal mudflats, mangroves and reedbeds are home to more than 30 species of mammals, including Eurasian otters, which are critically endangered in Hong Kong; 20 reptile species; eight amphibian species; more than 450 insect species; and 400 species of birds, more than 50 of which are of global conservation concern, including the iconic black-faced spoonbill, Saunders’s gull and Nordmann’s greenshank. Mai Po is also a haven for tens of thousands of migratory waterbirds, which rest and feed during their journeys between East Asia and Australia. The Mai Po and Inner Deep Bay region therefore has been listed since 1995 as a Ramsar Site by Unesco, which is internationally recognised for its high biological and ecological value. “When compared to its surrounding regions like southern mainland China and northern Vietnam, Hong Kong has an extensive protected area system, which has been well managed for decades.”

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Outside of the Ramsar Site, there are existing wild populations of Chinese pangolins and golden coin turtles—both of which have long been threatened by trafficking and poaching—as well as Hong Kong newts, Romer’s tree frogs, Hong Kong tree geckos and Bogadek’s burrowing lizards, some of which are endemic to Hong Kong. “That lizard is found only on a couple of islands close to Kau Yi Chau [an island off Peng Chau],” he says. “It’s named after the biology teacher who brought me into this profession.”

Chan vividly remembers his schoolboy days at St Louis School, where Father Anthony Bogadek, a Croatian-born priest and herpetologist who came to Hong Kong in 1948, had a “mysterious snake room somewhere hidden below the basketball court”. “When I was in Form One [aged 12], I volunteered to help him study and collect the specimens he needed. He put me in charge of the daily maintenance of quite an impressive collection of live snakes, lizards and frogs,” he recalls. Chan would tag along with his biology teacher on field trips to the then undeveloped Tung Chung, where, alongside herpetologists from the US, they studied amphibians and reptiles in the countryside, including some of the last rough-skinned floating frogs, a species which is now extinct in Hong Kong. “All these experiences contributed to my determination to study and conserve nature.”

In the 1990s, Chan studied at Queen Mary and Westfield College (today known as Queen Mary University of London), where he was one of the few Chinese students reading zoology—but his focus remained on Asia. “I became fascinated by the wildlife of Hong Kong and mainland China,” he says. When he returned home in 1996, he started working with Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden (KFBG), a body which focuses on protecting the city’s flora and fauna, and was involved in setting up its wildlife rescue and conservation programme.

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During his first two years, many of the animals sent to KFBG were turtles, lizards and snakes confiscated by the government from the illegal wildlife trade. Some of the more memorable cases include an overnight operation to recover thousands of turtles—both alive and already dead and decaying; and a mission to rescue two two-metre-long water monitor lizards crammed together in a tiny cage in a Yau Ma Tei snake soup shop. Another time, he had to wrangle a number of fully grown caimans owned—with government permission—by The Chinese University of Hong Kong. “They grew too big for the lab and the university couldn’t handle it,” he recalls. For nearly three years, he rescued, nurtured and rehabilitated thousands of animals at KFBG. Every month, he would also head to wildlife markets in Guangdong to monitor the species and number of animals being traded there, and to set up one of the first wildlife trade studies in China.

“The problem is the demand for wildlife as a commodity; the rural communities in southeast Asia who struggle to earn a living and are paid to collect everything they can illegally and ship them all the way to Hong Kong,” he says. While there are regulations in place, Hong Kong’s position as a major global air and sea port and a gateway into mainland China makes it a prime middle point for wildlife trafficking. “That got me looking at the bigger picture and really wanting to do field conservation.”

In 2001, he joined KFBG’s China programme and gradually shifted his attention from combating wildlife trafficking and rescuing injured wildlife to conserving endangered species and threatened habitats. He and his team visited Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan to assess biodiversity assets in southern China and identify the key threats they were facing. Then they started conservation work for species such as South China tigers—the last confirmed sighting of which was more than two decades ago—and Hainan gibbons. The role had been “a dream job since I read up on the Chinese tigers that would visit Hong Kong once in a while as a child”, he says. “You have to do conservation where the source is. If you don’t protect China’s wildlife, all the stories about environmental damage [will become reality].”

In 2003, Chan led a project to rescue the last population of Hainan gibbons. Two years later, he was invited by the provincial government to lead a year-long biodiversity assessment and to set up Hainan’s largest nature reserve in Ying Ge Ling, an ancient rainforest that is half the size of Hong Kong and that contains many rare and even previously undocumented species of flora and fauna; it was recognised as a national reserve in 2014. In 2006, he was invited by the Hainan government to be the deputy director of Yinggeling to train 200 rangers to protect the reserve; under his watch, the gibbon population increased from two groups of 13 individuals to five groups, with a total of 40 animals.

Over the past two decades, Chan would often go camping in the forests of Cambodia and mainland China; but when the pandemic grounded him in Hong Kong, it became clear to him that he had lost touch with the wildlife of his home city. The realisation came at about the same time as the government announced new development plans. “I decided it was time for me to contribute to Hong Kong’s conservation work,” he says, and took the WWF job soon thereafter.

As well as continuing WWF’s efforts in wetland and marine conservation and public education, Chan has also been busy planning and promoting green finance and gauging the support of corporations for investing in sustainable development. He is pleased to see that, compared to when he first started out, the city is more aware of the need for conservation. “There is a change in this generation’s behaviours and mindset,” he observes, pointing out that, for example, civet cats are no longer seen as a delicacy. “But we also have bigger conservation challenges like climate change and a booming population that requires more land and resources from nature.” He would like to see the government be more proactive in its engagement with green groups and to protect what is not already protected.

“For Hong Kong, I would love to see very well-managed networks of protected areas that preserve the diverse biodiversity of the region,” he says. “It’s my dream that no more endangered species will become extinct.”

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