by David Adam James Lee, Singapore

Singapore is a multicultural city state island with people from diverse ethnicities and religions living together in harmony. Singapore was once an undeveloped country. As the world progress and technology advances, Singapore former prime minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, had a vision of making Singapore into a Garden City in 1967. A city with abundance of lush greenery and a clean environment to make life more sustainable for the country and the nation.

Singapore is a small country with finite land and its being challenged due to climate change. The increase of temperature, rising of sea levels and the changes of weather patterns that causes significant problems to businesses and livelihoods. Singapore is discovering ways to adapt and overcome climate changes with architecture designs, technology and planting more trees around the island.

Singapore is reducing the use of fossil fuel and using more of natural gas and renewable energy to generate electricity to power the country. Solar panels are being built onto rooftops and open spaces of buildings and reservoirs to capture the sun light and generates into electrical energy. A single solar panel helps to capture 1,450 watts of electrical energy within a day. The floating solar panel systems that is built on the reservoir like Bedok Reservoir which only takes 2% of the water area helps to power approximately 800 housing units in Singapore. As technology improves overtime, the use of solar panels will increase and able to produce more electricity. 

Singapore has help to reduce the use of electricity by building cascading greenery on the external side of the buildings to cool the building externally. This in turn reduce the use of air conditioning to cool the internal of the buildings and provides clean and fresh oxygen to Singapore. Gardens by the Bay and Changi Jewel are one of the many Singapore tourist attractions that infuses nature helps to cool the environment and reduce carbon emissions.

Singapore vision of the City in the Garden of the future to continue to transform into a clean, and green metropolis. Singapore with the help of nature has come up with the Green Plan 2030. Singapore is now changing all carbon emissions vehicles into electrical vehicles by 2040. Singapore is turning at least 80% of the buildings with lush greenery and plants by 2030. Singapore will help to reduce the carbon emission by 36% by 2030. B y implementing 5 times more solar panels onto open areas, more lush green buildings, switching to power saving technology and planting one million trees around Singapore.

Nothing is Impossible to Reimagine the visions to tackle against climate change and to have a prosper future of City in a Garden.

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Disclaimer: the photo story is part of the ASEAN Photo Competition, implemented by the ASEAN Foundation and the ASEAN-German Energy Programme (AGEP) that focused on the theme of ”#ASEANYouth Shaping the Vision of Renewable Energy as the New Normal”. AGEP is commissioned by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by the Deutsche Gessellschaft fürInternationale Zusammernabeit (GIZ) GmbH in close cooperation with the ASEAN Centre for Energy (ACE). The competition aims to contribute to the awareness of the benefits of renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro, tidal, geothermal, and biomass) paving the way for ASEAN’s cleaner and greener future. The contents of this photo story do not necessarily reflect the views of ASEAN Foundation or AGEP.