Speech by Minister Desmond Lee at the Festival of Biodiversity
Sep 25, 2021
President Halimah Yacob, NParks colleagues, community stakeholders, friends, ladies and gentlemen, a very good morning to everyone. We are indeed very honoured this morning to welcome Madam President as our Guest-of-Honour again. She has been a very strong supporter of the Festival of Biodiversity and the work that many of our partners do on the ground, nurturing our City in Nature. I would like to thank Madam for taking the time to join us in celebrating our native biodiversity.
A big thank you as well, to the members of the Biodiversity Roundtable and our partners from the nature community, teachers and students, for your support and hard work, in organising and contributing to the Festival of Biodiversity for the tenth year running. And if my memory serves me right, we have been organizing Festivals of Biodiversity every year, even last year.
Whether it’s helping to set up the exhibition booths, sharing your projects or reaching out to the public – I would like to thank all of you for your passion and dedication. We hold this Festival every year in celebration of the rich biodiversity that we share our island with, and in recognition of our responsibility, as stewards of our environment, to take good care of this natural heritage for future generations.
But as a small city state, we face many challenges in doing so. Our land constraints mean we must carefully balance our developmental needs with nature conservation. And we also face the pressing concern of climate change, which is an existential threat for us – and our biodiversity. That is why we launched the Singapore Green Plan 2030 to pursue sustainable development, and to do our part to combat climate change.
One of the key pillars of the Green Plan is to transform Singapore into a City in Nature. Given our limited land that is both a city and a country, we don’t have the luxury of large areas outside our city where we can conserve nature.
For us, nature is within, nature is all around, and nature is part of the city, not outside. Hence, we are weaving nature much more closely as part of the fabric of our city. So that City and Nature not only co-exist, but can also form a symbiotic relationship
Today, I’d like to share a bit more about what we’re doing to achieve this vision: how we’re using more nature-based solutions to strengthen our climate resilience; how these and other efforts help to conserve our native biodiversity; and how all of us can play a part in this journey.
Strengthening Climate Resilience through Nature-based Solutions
Let me begin with nature-based solutions. These are efforts to enhance our natural environment, which in turn also help us to mitigate the effects of climate change. So nature-based solutions are win-win solutions, for nature and the city.
Let me briefly share three types of nature-based solutions that we are working on. First, we are using nature-based solutions to protect our coastlines. By planting trees and shrubs, as well as enhancing and restoring mangroves along our coasts, we can help to defend ourselves from rising sea levels, while at the same time, providing key habitats for marine and coastal species to thrive.
We started these efforts as early as 2010, when we enhanced the protections along the coastline of Pulau Tekong. Learning from this experience, we recently completed a similar coastal protection project at Kranji Coastal Nature Park, bordering the coast of Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve.
With the help of more than 250 enthusiastic members of our community, we successfully planted nearly 800 trees and shrubs to restore and enhance the coastal site, including rare species such as the
Ormocarpum cochinchinense – a native tree previously thought to be extinct in Singapore.
Through such hard work, combined with good engineering, we established a natural green belt and low rock structures that will enhance the various habitats in the area, while protecting our coastlines from erosion.
I am therefore happy to announce that we will be embarking on two new and more extensive coastal protection projects on Pulau Ubin. These will be carried out in partnership with the community: one at the northern coastline, and the other in the south, at Sungei Durian. This will restore the island’s coastlines and mangrove habitats, and bring back more of the island’s rich biodiversity by addressing ongoing erosion and habitat loss.
Second, we are intensifying and enhancing nature in our green spaces, which will help to cool the environment. Today, more than 7,800 hectares of Singapore’s total land area is set aside for green spaces like nature reserves, parks, and park connectors.
We are doing a lot more to enhance this, including setting aside another 1,000 hectares for green spaces, and planting an additional one million trees through the OneMillionTrees movement. These trees and green spaces can sequester carbon, improve our air and water quality, provide shade for pedestrians, and cool our urban environment – especially in some of our hotter areas, such as in our industrial zones.
Third, we are naturalising more of our blue spaces – our waterways and waterbodies – which will also enhance our city’s flood resilience. Over the past decade, we have been widening and deepening our existing drains, and building larger new drains, to improve our flood resilience.
We are also naturalising our waterways and waterbodies, by transforming concrete canals into natural rivers or streams, or reservoirs into natural lakes. This will help to reduce the risk of flash floods for adjacent properties. At the same time, it creates new habitats for wildlife and more recreational spaces for Singaporeans to enjoy. You can see the results of such work at Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park and Jurong Lake Gardens. We will continue to do this in our other parks and gardens.
Enhancing Our Biodiversity Conservation Efforts
In these ways, nature-based solutions can help to protect our coastlines, cool the environment, and improve our flood resilience. At the same time, they support our key strategies in building climate resilience under our City in Nature vision, and improve our ecological resilience as well – by creating new habitats and connecting existing ones, nature-based solutions help us to better conserve our biodiversity.
We will continue to press on with our biodiversity conservation programmes. For example, through our species recovery programme, we make a special effort to conserve our key native flora and fauna, especially rare and threatened species, by reintroducing and propagating them into their original habitats, as well as suitable new habitats.
This year, we will add 13 new plant species, as well as 13 new animal species, to our species recovery programme. This includes the native orchid species,
Nervilia singaporensis, previously thought to be extinct in Singapore. Yet it was re-discovered by our very own NParks researchers in July 2019 at the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve.
And we are committed to do more. We will set more ambitious targets, to increase our recovery efforts from 90 plant and 40 animal species currently, to 100 plant and 60 animal species by 2030.
Through research and development, we are also developing new technologies that aid in conservation. As part of NParks’ Plant-A-Coral, Seed-A-Reef programme, we are experimenting with a new mineral accretion technology, which stimulates corals through low-voltage electricity, to promote coral growth.
And we are expanding our outreach efforts, to involve more people in our collective conservation efforts. For example, we are implementing the new Marine Educational Outreach programme for schools and the public on local marine biology and marine conservation.
Together, these marine conservation programmes will help to restore and enhance key habitats, including our coral reefs, which are particularly vulnerable to changing temperatures as a result of climate change. I would like to thank Aramco Asia Singapore – who are here with us today – for your generous donation, and strong support for these marine conservation initiatives.
We are already beginning to see the fruits of our conservation efforts. Two years ago, we shared that we were reviewing and updating the Singapore Red List, which indicates the conservation status of our biodiversity, including plants and animals that are vulnerable or endangered.
I am happy to share some updates from our ongoing review, which we will consolidate into the third edition of the Singapore Red Data Book, which is a key resource that guides our conservation strategies. Based on our current findings, over 40 of our animal species are now more resilient in Singapore. For example, the Sunda Slow Loris – which was previously a critically endangered species, is now less threatened in Singapore.
A recent study by NParks on the Lesser Mousedeer also highlights how the critically endangered population has recovered since the 1990s, which is highlighted by this review as well. This is also the first time that sponges and stony corals have been evaluated in the Singapore Red List, thanks to the increasing capabilities of our marine experts, and the growing interest in marine science in Singapore.
In fact, Singapore’s contributions to biodiversity conservation go beyond our shores. We have just launched the updated version of the Singapore Index on Cities’ Biodiversity. This is an index under the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity, used by cities worldwide to measure their progress in biodiversity conservation, and to guide their policies and plans in this area.
It was named after Singapore as we had first proposed it, and our very own NParks officers helped to develop it. We are proud to do what we can to support biodiversity conservation around the world, especially in cities and urban areas.
Partnering the Community
None of these achievements would have been possible without the strong support of our community partners. Over the years, we’ve seen a growing interest and passion in safeguarding our natural heritage among many Singaporeans.
Today, we have nearly 70 members in the Biodiversity Roundtable, from nature groups, schools, academia, as well as members of the Friends of the Parks initiatives. This is more than twice the number since the launch of this Festival in 2012. Our citizen scientists have also grown in strength – from less than 500 individuals to over 9,000 this year. They form part of NParks’ volunteer base of over 54,000 individuals.
This is a very encouraging development, and we do hope that even more people will step forward and join us in our journey to transform Singapore into a City in Nature.
If you are interested to find out more about our local biodiversity, and how you can get involved in our conservation efforts, do participate in the Festival’s events. We have had a series of in-person events such as tree-planting, with safe-distancing measures of course. And, we have planned a suite of virtual programmes, such as a virtual webinar on our rainforests, and stay-home activities, so that more Singaporeans can celebrate with us, in a safe manner.
Even beyond this Festival, there are always lots of ways to get involved, from tree-planting under our OneMillionTrees movement, to citizen science programmes under our Community in Nature initiative. Just visit our NParks website, follow us on Facebook or Telegram, or write to us at any time.
On that note, thank you once again Madam President, thank you to all our friends from the Festival of Biodiversity organizing committee and from the Biodiversity Roundtable. I wish you all a wonderful and safe Festival of Biodiversity. Thank you.