Dame Jane, Dr Goodall * (left) – or Dr Jane, as she is called by the many thousands of children around the world who have joined her Roots & Shoots programme – has returned to Hong Kong. Roots & Shoots is run by her very own Jane Goodall Institute, and works to foster in youths appreciation, respect and compassion for the world, its cultures and creatures through community service and learning.

Dr Goodall, who is a United Nations Messenger of Peace, is here to do what has become her mission the world over: to spread hope for the future of a planet under distress – and to prick people to action. No more empty pledges to change our ways, please.

Her new passion is really not new. It’s an extension of her life-long work with primates that made her a household name, at the heart of which is deep respect for Earth, its creatures and their rapidly disappearing habitats.

But climate change has thrust a new urgency upon Dr Goodall and her work: now, she unashamedly calls herself an activist.

“We are consuming non-renewable resources at an alarming rate. Something must change, or the planet will face a real disaster,” Dr Goodall says.

Where that change comes from is very much the focus of her talks in Hong Kong. Dr Goodall has spoken often in Hong Kong, this time around addressing audiences as varied as school children, diplomats, and business people – an indication of her universal appeal.

However, where the earnest passion burns as brightly as ever, it seems Dr Goodall wants much more for Hong Kong than it appears willing to do for itself.

“A lot is taken for granted in Hong Kong,” Dr Goodall says. And there is a tendency to lay blame for things that are going wrong at anyone else’s feet but our own, the government’s, for one.

But much depends on Hong Kong people working for their own future. What happens and how soon it happens “depends on the number of constituents who speak up”, she says – but describes an imbalance between initial enthusiasm and results in the territory.

If there is a sense of impotence at what may seem to be an insurmountable task ahead, Dr Goodall has very practical ways of breaking down that obstacle into small, simple everyday actions.

“If everyone on the planet consumed and lived as people in America do, we would need three more planets to support that lifestyle,” she says. “But we don’t have three more planets. We have only one.”

Some of her descriptions of the damage people are causing to the planet, its inhabitants – and to their own kind – are well known, but no less alarming for that: the loss of biodiversity, tropical forests, the spread of deserts, the unequal distribution of wealth – all at the expense of nature. “We have to find ways of making changes,” Dr Goodall says, impressing a strong message of individual responsibility: “This is where the wealthy can lead the way. They can influence in their buying choices. The poor can’t, because they must buy the cheapest, so it’s up to the wealthy. Either [the companies] will change or go out of business. It always comes back to us.”

In spite of it all, Dr Goodall insists there is hope: “There must be hope. Because without hope there is apathy,” she says. She has written passionately about the four reasons for this hope: the power of the human brain, to understand and to solve the problems facing it; children’s energy, enthusiasm and commitment to learn about and fight the wrongs in the world; the “indomitable nature of the human spirit”, which can achieve goals that seem impossible, and that can inspire; and nature’s own resilience.

So while the power to influence immediate change rests with adults, the future good is the hands of children. It is a challenge that many are taking up through Roots & Shoots – and one with a happy ending. The storyteller insists.