Creating A Climate Of Change

After experiencing the alarming consequences of natural disasters, Dee Poon is on a mission to promote sustainability. She talks to Oliver Giles about the big environmental questions—and solutions—that occupy her mind

- Oliver Giles

Dee Poon loves Hong Kong. She loves the fact that it’s so convenient, that Cantonese is such an expressive, slang-packed language and that the city is literally an urban jungle where she can spot porcupines and wild boar just outside her apartment building. But often, when Dee returns to the city after one of her frequent business trips, she feels worried for it. “You know how in lots of sci-fimovies and books the city is totally disconnected from what surrounds it?” Dee muses. “The city feels like a bubble, and in sci-fistories big threats always come from outside the city. That’s what Hong Kong feels like to me sometimes—as though we’re moving towards that super-alienated and dystopian future.”

The threat looming large in Dee’s mind is climate change. You’d be forgiven for thinking that whatever calamities global warming brings, Dee would be largely immune. As the daughter of two tycoons (Harvey Nichols owner Dickson Poon and Esquel Group chairman Marjorie Yang) and a successful businesswoman in her own right, she has the means to whisk herself to safety. But Dee, who is on this year’s Generation T list, recently experienced the terrifying effects of global warming first-hand.