Hong Kong's businesses have been slow to embrace environmental management principles, particularly in the SME sector. This article analyses key barriers and incentives to engaging Hong Kong businesses with voluntary environmental initiatives and compares their relevance for companies of different sizes. As in other countries, SMEs show a much lower uptake of such activities than larger companies. Their approach towards environmental management is predominantly reactive, and legislation remains the key driver for engaging them with environmental change. Inadequate government policy and support, societal attitudes and corporate culture all contribute significantly to the comparatively poor development of corporate environmental management among Hong Kong companies. As long as most SMEs regard voluntary environmental activities as costly and unnecessary 'extras' that endanger their competitiveness and detract resources from their core business without offering any tangible benefits, fundamental improvements in their environmental performance will be difficult to achieve.

Environmental education and awareness training can help to develop and encourage a transition to a greener corporate culture. A series of environmental education and awareness training programmes of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC) (Hong Kong) was used as a case study to assess how learning transfers through nature-based environmental education and awareness training and to investigate the possible outcomes of providing nature-based training to employees. Evaluation of the training outcomes, in terms of changes in employees' environmental knowledge, attitudes and behaviour, was surveyed by using retrospective post-and then-test questionnaires. Results showed that employees who joined these programmes gained knowledge and changed their values and behaviour towards the environment significantly. The study also indicated the establishment of trust in and satisfaction with the organization among employees through the training, which in turn promoted employees' organizational commitment towards corporate sustainability.

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The environmental performance of Hong Kong's businesses is currently perceived as rather poor. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular are mostly unaware of the environmental impact of their business. Government and professional bodies have recently started to develop various initiatives to improve the SME sector's awareness of environmental and social issues, and external factors such as supply chain requirements, consumer preferences and energy prices are also exerting a growing influence. Based on extensive interviews with representatives of seven key stakeholder groups, this paper explores the effectiveness of such drivers to engage SMEs with environmental change and corporate social responsibility (CSR). It finds that most existing efforts, such as environmental support programmes and award schemes, do not have a great impact on the environmental and social performance of Hong Kong's SMEs.