Over the past 50 years, Singapore has transformed from a pollution center to an ecological dream city, says Luciana Pricop inhabitat.com – wrote the web site.
From a distance, the country’s landscape looks like all other modern city with plenty of skyscrapers dotting its skyline.
However, inside, in the middle of town, a green heart grew, spreading within the minds of its inhabitants and along the partitions of the buildings.
This heart was began by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, often called the “Chief Gardener”, who pushed his imperative for a clean and green Singapore until it became a reality.
By the Sixties, raw sewage filled the city-state’s already polluted canals with a lot sewage that sludge-like water poured into the Singapore River and surrounding areas.
“In the 1960s, Singapore was like any other developing country – dirty and polluted, lacking adequate sanitation and struggling with high unemployment,” explained Masagos Zulkifli, Singapore’s Minister of Environment and Water Resources, in his recent speech at Global Environment Outlook 6 (GEO6 )
“These challenges were particularly acute given our constraints as a small island state with limited resources; We didn’t even have enough drinking water.” These problems encouraged rapid industrialization, which helped improve the living conditions of Singapore’s residents, but widespread urbanization only worsened environmental concerns.
Yew saw the decline as “a destroyed urban jungle of concrete [that] destroys the human spirit.” He believed that “we want nature’s greenery to lift our spirits,” so in 1963 he planted the primary of many trees to encourage a generation of eco-warriors.
This has turn out to be Singapore’s story of the “biophilic city in a garden”. The extraordinary journey began with this small act, shortly before the separation of Singapore from Malaysia. Today, town is at the middle of architectural innovation and technological design and has turn out to be a world environmental powerhouse.
“We just wanted to rise above the region we found ourselves in,” Lim Liang Jim, group director of the National Center for Biological Diversity on the National Parks Board, told UN Environment. “Lee Kuan Yew had a plan. Keep us clean. Make sure we are eco-friendly.”
The generation that pioneered this alteration understood that if Singapore became a “nice place to live, people would come and invest.” Then we took it to the following level,” Jim explained. But this movement was not only of an economic and aesthetic nature. Singaporeans who desired to stay on their land called on the small self-governing city state to scrub up the region.
These residents began an arduous 30-year campaign to scrub up pollution and create agencies with nobody to support their cause.
This led to the creation of the National Parks Board, which decided that in all places an individual looked there needs to be greenery and plants. The board rejected the thought of locking itself in a concrete jungle and as an alternative created a sustainable model that any city could emulate.
Part of the changes going down include educating students from an early age on the importance of environmental awareness, conservation and advocacy.
“We are going back to history to make sure that we’re constructing from scratch and to make sure that Singapore’s youth don’t take our 50-year history with no consideration,” said Lim, who believes that history can easily be forgotten by society within the minds of young Singaporeans who know just the smell of fresh air and views of lush greenery.
“[Environmentalism] it must be something driven by a grassroots movement, it has to turn out to be political in some sense. A nature reserve can’t be easily converted into buildings, this might require a reasoned discussion with the general public. We must make sure that the younger generation appreciates our nature and biodiversity and doesn’t take them with no consideration.”
This is Singapore’s mission to preserve its achievements while ensuring the longer term of its vision as an environmental leader.
It believes that its residents are entrusted with such care that makes caring for common spaces second nature to them. Residents have built a brand new Singapore from the bottom up, adding modern features corresponding to SGBioAtlas, which allows residents to turn out to be “citizen scientists” by uploading photos of plants and animals to the National Center for Biological Diversity’s central database.
Other ongoing projects include urban planning and zoning, in addition to policy changes and public awareness campaigns specializing in lower carbon footprints and 0 waste, amongst others.
Through his visionary leadership, Singapore’s Long Term Plan features a Sustainable Development Fund phase within the Singapore Sustainable Development Plan 2015, which highlights improvements in sectors covered by all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
“Our approach was to build a livable and sustainable city through pragmatic policymaking based on sound economic principles and science; focus on long-term planning and effective implementation; and the ability to mobilize public support for the common good,” Zulkifli said. Singapore has set the usual for a clean and green future all over the world and it looks absolutely inviting.
