Singapore: A Young and Small Nation With Huge Climate Commitments

Southeast Asian city-state Singapore declared its independence from Malaysian Federation 53 years ago. Despite the fact that it is young as a nation and small in geography, its government and people are more mature and more understanding their part in addressing global climate change under the “Common but Differentiated Responsibilities” principle.

This week, I was very impressed and amazed to get a chance to witness and learn how Singapore’s National Day celebration is held each year. I can feel a strong sense of belonging as Singaporeans and high spirit of national unity in diversity — a factor that undeniably makes this tiny nation bound together, moving faster and getting stronger over the past five decades.

In Singapore, the government keeps people at the center of most, if not all, of its development policies, ensuring that clean and sustainable environment are always the priority. And, during the celebration, what interested me most is Singapore’s government’s utmost effort to advance outreach strategies on sustainable future — one of which is climate action program. Singapore — the island-city state — is actually one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change while polluting the world less, but it continues to firmly live up to the commitments it made under 2015 Climate Agreement.

According to International Energy Agency’s 2015 report, Singapore was ranked 26th out of 142 nation when it comes to the per capita emissions despite the fact that the island nation only contributes barely 0.11 percent of global emissions. This report could manifest that each individual Singaporean generates much more carbon emissions.

On climate change front, Singaporean government understands that community-based method on climate is as imperative as legislation and policy issue. It can only be mitigated when it is able to manage to bring all people and private companies together on board in order to reduce their carbon footprints and get to build climate resilience.

Recently, in addition to introducing carbon taxes on greater emitters and advance drainage system to cope with the rise of sea level, the government’s agencies have been also actively communicating and outreaching to people in order to raise awareness on climate issues, making sure that everyone whether elderly or young people is future-ready to tackle climate impacts — which include rising of sea level, extreme heat waves, droughts, floods and probably other unprecedented natural disasters.

Good news is that people in each community are more responsive to the government’s programs, becoming actively engaged and eager to learn more on what they can do about it as individual, and more and more Singaporeans now pledge their personal commitment to climate actions, which take account of the change of lifestyles. Moreover, young Singaporeans also begin to talk about plastic issue if they can do more plastic recycling to reduce the pollution.

I might be a bit optimistic about what I have seen happening in Singapore when it comes to insisting and intensifying climate action. However, I still advocate that this can be somewhat other governments should learn and follow to make climate issues more personal, enabling people to feel that they can do something and comprehend that this not only matters to the policy makers. When times passes by, we will be able to change people’s perceptions toward believing that their small and simple actions can make a difference — a footstep that is definitely useful to shape the future for younger generation.

What we all know is climate change has no national boundary, and it affects every one of us regardless of what language we speak or what religions we have faith in. Thus, take action now to make better tomorrow, otherwise it will be too late. You don’t need to wait until you become a policy maker to take action, but just ask yourself what you can do now.

I would suggest that you can carry out a simple step which is changing your current lifestyles if you never care or think of it before. That can include trying to save daily energies consuming, save water and other imperative resources. You also need to take care of your atmosphere by making the air cleaner. If you are reading this and are driving your cars to work each day, you better consider stopping doing so and switching to choose alternatives to avoid emitting more carbon dioxide. So you now can become a part of solution :)

Well, I believe getting these small steps done is uneasy, and sometimes take long time to get used to doing it. But even though it takes longer, it doesn’t mean it is impossible.