Over the last two weeks, a group of governments met in Hobart, Australia, to negotiate a new Antarctic Ocean Sanctuary.

They failed.

Although 22 governments supported the sanctuary, negotiators from Russia, China and Norway stopped it from going ahead. The Russian and Chinese delegations even used delaying tactics to waste time and hold up the negotiations, rather than engaging with the scientific evidence for the sanctuary.

This failure leaves the incredible wildlife of the Antarctic exposed to pressures from overfishing, pollution and climate change.

There’s a specific international body that makes decisions about the waters around Antarctica: the Antarctic Ocean Commission. The Commission, officially known as CCAMLR, is made up of 24 countries plus the European Union.

It’s their job to look after Antarctic marine life and make sure the continent’s seas (which no single country controls) don’t become a free-for-all of overfishing. But because every country has to agree before a new sanctuary can go ahead, it’s easy for a small minority to stop things from progressing.

The Antarctic Ocean Commission failed this time, and if they keep failing, it’ll be increasingly clear that they’re unfit for purpose and aren’t part of the solution.

Today is a sad day for everyone who cares about our blue planet. But this isn’t the end. In fact, it’s just the beginning — 2.7 million people joined the campaign for this ocean sanctuary and we’re going to come back stronger than ever.

First, we’ll keep working to protect the Antarctic Ocean. But that alone isn’t enough.

To truly start healing our blue planet, we need to think bigger. That means changing how the system works so it’s easier to protect large areas of our global oceans.

Soon, we’ll have a chance to do exactly that. There’s a new global ocean treaty on the table at the UN. If it’s approved, it’ll open the door to creating huge new protected areas covering at least one-third of the world’s oceans. Let’s not forget that 22 of the 25 countries at the Antarctic negotiations supported the creation of our sanctuary. In almost any other political forum, that would have been enough to make it a reality.

This could be a game-changer for ocean protection, and together, we can make it happen.

There has been a huge swell of public opinion globally against single-use plastics in the past couple of years.

So much plastic is being dumped in our oceans that our beaches are coated in rubbish and huge islands of swirling trash cover massive areas of the open seas.

Marine life from whales to turtles and seabirds to fish are being maimed and killed. Our plastic waste is even coming back to haunt us with seafood on our plates with plastic particles in their stomachs, which we then consume. It's probable that eating plastics this way is harming our health in ways we don't yet understand.

Thankfully, companies, cities and countries around the world are responding with bans of disposable plastic products.

Greenpeace has been at the forefront of campaigns to push these forward and never more so than in Hong Kong, a place that has a distressingly wasteful fast food culture.

We're here to change that. Let me tell you how we're doing it.

We used time-lapse cameras for eight days and on-site surveying of the Shing Mun River where it flows into Tolo Harbour in the New Territories to estimate how much plastic waste flows along that waterway. The answer: a staggering 17 million pieces a year.

And that's just one river.

The most common plastic items were tableware (cutlery and straws), bags, bottles, food packaging and polystyrene bits.

This waste is blown by the wind and flushed by the rain into drains where it enters river systems unchecked.

If we know who is producing the most plastic trash, then we can focus our campaigns on them to push for change and we will have the biggest effect worldwide. We can hold them accountable first for plastic pollution.

Our global organization teamed up with the Break Free from Plastic movement and rallied volunteers around the world to audit what brands were washing up on beaches. We had 10,000 volunteers across 42 countries and regions.

The top three companies producing waste on our beaches were

1. Coca-Cola (found in 40 out of 42 countries & regions)
2. PepsiCo, and
3. Nestlé

These companies have to be part of the solution.

Our Shing Mun River experiment showed that plastic tableware was top of the throwaway list. So in Hong Kong, that's who we decided to target first. But there are many fast food chains in Hong Kong so who should we focus on?

We picked Café de Coral (the largest local chain in Hong Kong) and Fairwood because they are two of the most popular and they also have more localised management teams, which means they can be more effective at making local decisions and they should have more pride in representing and protecting their home—Hong Kong.

In addition to analysis of transaction data, we went to their outlets and counted how many plastic utensils were handed out in a single day. From that, we estimated that in a single year, the two chains hand out 150 million plastic throwaway items Hong Kong-wide.

The government is now considering how to handle disposable plastics. Instead of launching a discount scheme for those who don't take plastic tableware and cups, they are suggesting stamps that can be collected and redeemed for reusable items later.

While it seems to be a step forward, cash discounts are much more effective – not everyone cares about the environment but most people care about saving money. Also, many people already have reusable tableware at home – which means there is no compelling advantage for customers to collect stamps.

Besides, the fast food chains will save money – why not pass that saving onto the customer?

The real solution, of course, is to have strong long-term plans from both the government and restaurants themselves to phase out using plastic tableware altogether.

As well as putting our ideas to the media we have been going straight to the source – the restaurants' owners themselves.

In September we invited ourselves to the shareholder meetings of both chains. Our activists handed out birthday buns with a "no plastic" logo and urged the companies to stop dishing out disposable plastics.

We organized for a group of children to paint images expressing their hope their future will not be ruined by plastic pollution and then took them to meet with Café de Coral senior management.

Our Plastic Free Alliance in Hong Kong is collecting supporters into a super group! Individuals, shops, restaurants, and schools can sign up and go plastic free. We provide stickers so that people can identify others who aspire to be plastic free too. Everyone is encouraged to share their stories of going plastic free and to support each other.

If you're not a member yet, what are you waiting for!

Together we can make Hong Kong plastic free!

There's no denying the urgency of climate change. This year we have witnessed some of the worst weather events on record around the globe with hurricanes, droughts, deadly forest fires and scorching heat.

Hong Kong did not escape. Typhoon Mangkhut – the most intense storm to hit Hong Kong since records began in 1946 – literally slammed into us causing injuries, uprooting tens of thousands of trees, and smashing windows. Add to that, our summers have been unseasonably long and hot in recent years. According to the Hong Kong Observatory, the number of 'very hot' days here is now three times as common as it was in 2000.

But it's not only the weather that's changing. People are too. They are beginning to take action. And this is the seed of our new campaign to give that action more power, more momentum, more solutions, and more impact. This is our #ReasonsForHope campaign.

People, organizations, cities, regions and countries all around the world are making changes. It could be bans on coal, bans on oil, installing solar power, ditching single-use plastics, legislating marine and forests protection, seeking climate justice in the courts. Take your pick! What are you doing for climate change? What are your #ReasonsForHope?

It's not the time to give up. Now is the time to stand up and do something about it.

And it's never been more urgent.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) most recently reported that we must keep the average temperature rise to within 1.5°C and to do that we must halve global carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 from 2010 levels, and make them "net zero" by 2050 at the very latest.

That report was scary, there's no doubt about it. But as our climate and energy campaigner Walton Li told journalists: "Although the report might appear miserable at first glance, it actually shows the pathways to limit warming to 1.5 degrees and how it is achievable."

We need radical and systemic change. But we can do it. Hong Kong can do it. The world can do it.

The key central change that must happen and must happen now is ditching fossil fuels.

Hong Kong is small but as an advanced region, our carbon footprint is sizeable – one of the world's largest per capita. We should and can move to be carbon neutral as soon as possible.

Hong Kong needs to be ambitious and aggressive and work to an 80% reduction of carbon emissions by 2030 by legislating for a massive uptake in renewable energy and investment in energy saving.

The feed-in tariff system that will allow people or organizations who generate their own renewable energy to sell it to the grid in principle is a practical way to encourage more clean energy production. But a sound implementation is needed as well.

The Hong Kong government must:

• Reduce red tape and make the process much easier to understand and simple to follow (that would make it VASTLY more attractive).
• Remove legal barriers for buildings to install renewable energy systems.
• Assess the solar potential in communities, such as the more than 1,000 schools across the territory and offer assistance to install solar panels on their rooftops.
• Introduce more initiatives to encourage clean energy generation. Currently, renewable energy makes up an embarrassing less than 1% of Hong Kong's energy. We are way behind.

We are the generation who will end fossil fuels, the generation that has the hope and courage to act.