Hong Kong protests: Nobel's planet meeting scrapped due to city's "sustained disruptions"

PARIS - A four-day environment symposium which was to gather 11 Nobel laureates in Hong Kong from Wednesday, has been scrapped due to "sustained disruptions in the city," the organisers said on Monday.

Efforts will be made to reschedule the event in Hong Kong, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Asia Society Hong Kong Centre (ASHK) said in a statement received in Paris.

Entitled the Nobel Laureates' Symposium on Global Sustainability, the event was to focus on Asia's urbanisation in the face of worsening scenarios for global warming.

The conference was to include Peter Doherty, 1996 co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, US-Australian astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, co-holder of the 2011 Nobel physics prize, and Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was co-awarded the 2007 peace prize.

The organisers "took the difficult decision to cancel the event due to the sustained disruptions in the city," the statement said.

They will "intensely explore options to reschedule the symposium... for Hong Kong, which is an important laboratory of urbanization for all of Asia," it said.

The symposium is the fourth in a series on sustainability organised by laureates.

It comes amid rising concern that global warming could reach double the UN's targeted ceiling of two deg C over pre-industrial times, and a renewed bid to forge a global pact on greenhouse gases by the end of 2015.