Remarks by Minister Desmond Lee at Singapore Bird Race 2021 Closing Webinar
Dec 12, 2021
A very good evening to everyone. I’m happy to join all of you this evening at the closing of the 37th Singapore Bird Race. I recall joining you all last year as well in a similar format.
I would like to start off by thanking the team from NSS Bird Group for working so hard to organise this year’s race. Despite the constraints from the pandemic, NSS has continued to hold this race and you’ve adapted so that Singaporeans can participate in the race and enjoy our rich biodiversity.
Unfortunately due to work exigencies I wasn’t able to join this year’s Bird Race, which would have otherwise been my fourth. Kim Chuah from NSS and I nevertheless spent a bit of time this morning at Sungei Buloh extension. Kim Chuah is my birdwatching teacher who introduced me to birdwatching during first race I took part in about eight years ago – and our team was called ‘Crimson Sunbird’ so this year we registered our team name as ‘Crimson Sunbird 2’ to re-live those memories. In just over an hour, thanks to his keen eye and experience, we managed to spot 27 bird species, both native and migratory.
Over the years, the Bird Race has continued to grow and attract more members from the community to appreciate birds, and our natural heritage.
I am glad to hear that this year’s race received strong support as well, with around 230 participants – from members of the nature community to families as well as young Singaporeans – and at Sungei Buloh we were delighted to meet two young Singaporean students who took part in the race for the first time.
Indeed, despite being very small and probably the only fully sovereign city-state in the world, Singapore plays a key role in the international ecosystem of nature, including birds.
We are an important stopover for migratory shorebirds along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, including raptors such as the Oriental Honey Buzzard and the Black Baza.
Every year, thousands of migratory shorebirds fly in from the Northern Hemisphere to the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve for food and shelter, to tide over the cold winter months.
Recently, we have also seen more rare species of migratory birds, such as the fairy pitta and spotted flycatcher, making landfall on our shores.
And just a year ago, there was an exciting study authored by my colleagues David Li, Yang Shufen and How Choon Beng that was published in nature scientific reports, which places us along the Central Asian Flyway too – small Singapore, highly urban but at the intersection of two important Flyways. And that’s why our work with NSS, with BirdLife International, together with the rest of our scientific community and our infrastructure agencies is actually very vital so that we can continue to recognise our international responsibilities to nature.
Events like the Bird Race play a key part in our efforts to strengthen the conservation of our natural heritage - they contribute to citizen science – as the data helps in the race but it also helps us in our overall monitoring of avian fauna populations to ensure that these bird species remain around for many generations to come.
They are an effective and important way to reach out to more people on the value of nature – I call this mainstreaming of nature conservation consciousness, and to grow our community of stewards.
Now, mainstreaming nature and conservation awareness is important because of one reason – we are only 720 square kilometres in size, and we need to constantly grapple with the tension between conservation and development, and find an equilibrium for sustainable development with a greater consciousness of climate action.
Now this tension is dynamic and constantly changing, because we sit at the intersection of three trends. The first is our society and our aspirations, which are changing. There is a personal need and desire for more space and privacy when it comes to our homes and personal spaces. We want more services, more amenities, more choices – whether in healthcare, sports, education, the arts, and so on. There is also a social demographic change – more nuclear families rather than three-generational families living together; more single households, and greater desire by young people to live on their own. A changing society means that there will be more pressures for more urban space.
Second is the evolving nature of our jobs, livelihoods and economy, putting new and different demands on our land use. But encouragingly, the third trend is greater support and mainstream consciousness of the importance of conserving our biodiversity and natural habitats within the heart of our city, and an acute understanding of how precious and special we are to not just have a primary rainforest but very diverse habitats all within the city.
So how do we try to manage all of this? Let me just share how – when it comes to conservation in a city-state – we take both a community approach as well as a science-based approach.
For example, under our Nature Conservation Masterplan, we protect our core nature areas, such as the mangroves and muddy shores of the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve.
We are also adding buffers to these core areas, because these core areas are surrounded by urban Singapore. And we provide these buffers by adding more nature parks – sometimes on land that was originally slated for other uses.
For example, while the Mandai Mangrove and Mudflat was initially planned for factory use because of its location to the Woodlands Checkpoint and the Causeway, but we decided because of scientific studies – including very important input from NSS –to keep it as a nature park given its ecological significance. We moved it away from economic and security use towards conservation – and work is well under way. This also supports the conservation of migratory birds at the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve – so our strong justification for doing this would be the geospatial data that we got from migratory birds, both within Singapore and internationally.
We also actively restore and enhance our habitats and recover our native species.
We have a Forest Restoration Action Plan, where we work closely with our partners in the nature community to restore the greenery of our core nature areas. This is done carefully and deliberately – by choosing the right species of trees, and planting them in strategic locations, to strengthen the conservation of the site and to enable and transition of secondary forest towards primary where possible.
We also put in place species recovery programmes to conserve our native flora and flora, with species recovery efforts for 120 species today. For example, the Straw-headed Bulbul is a globally threatened bird. But through our efforts to protect and enhance their habitats, in close partnership with the community and nature groups, Singapore remains a global stronghold for this species today.
These efforts will also help to strengthen ecological connectivity for our native flora and fauna to thrive in the heart of our city – including the migratory shorebirds that visit us.
Thank you, and have a good evening ahead.