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The following is a transcript (English portion) of the Secretary for the Environment, Transport and Works, Dr Sarah Liao's stand-up session after giving a luncheon talk to the Foreign Correspondents' Club today (December 2):

Reporter : How would you try to prevent any pollution caused by the demolition of Hunghom Peninsula?

Dr Liao : In the waste management plan as well as the environmental control plan that the developer is going to produce which I am yet to see, they must list out how they can mitigate noise pollution and air pollution in the process of demolition. And there are Noise Control Ordinance and Air Pollution Control Ordinance to govern that.

Reporter : The $1.7 billion that you mentioned yesterday as economic losses caused by pollution, the green groups said that it was underestimate. Do you have any comments on that? Do you have any plan to do another study to measure the actual cost?

Dr Liao : I think it is very difficult to measure the actual cost, it is an extrapolation from the correlation study that we have been trying to correlate respiratory and heart diseases that linked to the air pollution index. This is a statistical study so you can err on either side but this is our part of figures.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion)

Ends/Thursday, December 2, 2004

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