Closing Remarks by Minister Desmond Lee at The 'Long Island' Public Engagement at the URA Centre

May 14, 2024

Today is the sixth engagement session on ‘Long Island’. We have carried out stakeholder engagements with business owners, community groups, and so on. But today is the first public engagement session, and there will be more sessions over the next few weeks. We have had overwhelming interest to participate in a dialogue like this one today.

But it is not a time limited process, we have many more years of work before this becomes a reality. Since November last year when we made the announcement that we were going to embark on environmental and technical studies, we have received over 500 correspondences and ideas. As we begin this process, we hope that you will keep engaging us, giving us your views, from conceptual, to emotional, to technical ideas, so that we can keep improving.

By listening to the different groups, I was able to get a sense of the pulse of the discussion, in terms of what people wanted to see at ‘Long Island’.

The aspiration for this to be like the existing East Coast Park, that we can keep the recreational aspects of it, its rusticity, openness and inclusivity; maintain some of the heritage that has developed over the decades, making East Coast Park not just a recreational space, but also a place with emotional value to people.

There were also ideas about how to make use of the waterfront, ranging from ideas about nature conservation, nature-based solutions, to places for mangrove or coral to establish.

People also mentioned housing, economic opportunities, connectivity to the other parts of Singapore, as well as recreation such as boating, kayaking, sailing and fishing.

There were also concerns about the impacts of the ‘Long Island’ process.

People who are residing along the East Coast wondered what will happen to their waterfront and view today.

People are concerned about whether East Coast Park will still be East Coast Park. And when it is enclosed as a freshwater bay, what will happen to the beach?

People raised concerns about possible noise from the pumping station, and if it will affect the rusticity and enjoyability of the place. The impact to residents, businesses, people who use the space for recreation, and people who enjoy the memory of East Coast Park.

All in, we have a sense of the themes that are emerging and taking shape, as life is breathed into that space. All our contributions will be recorded as part of the history of ‘Long Island’.

We are about to start technical and environmental studies in a few months. It will be a very long and detailed process, and there will be many stages.

All that you see today is purely conceptual; people ask me why just a straight line? Because we have no reason to do anything other than a straight line. It is so early an idea that it will literally start to take shape once we get more engineering and environmental hard data. That will then guide us, and we have years ahead of us before we start anything on ground.

As some of you quite rightly noted during the discussions, this is not a “today, tomorrow” kind of thing. Today it is business as usual; tomorrow ‘Long Island’ will appear and let us just relocate everything we have across. It is going to take decades, before we complete this whole endeavour. The East Coast Park that you see today was not an overnight piece of work. It started in the 60s and was completed in the 80s. Parts of it are as young as 40 years old, others as old as 60 years old. It really takes a long time to bear fruit.

Today, when we talk about this, imagine many decades down the line, you start to see things taking shape. The process is as important and as impactful as the final outcome.

As we do that, there will have to be adjustments along the way. We have to work with the residents, businesses, recreational folk, heritage people and environmentalists, for each stage. With each stage, we are going to create something and we have to decide what to do with the piece of land that we start to develop.

All we know is that it must be done. First and foremost, the main objective of this whole enterprise is to protect us against the rising sea levels. That is not something we can compromise on. The exact solutions can be up for further discussion as the technical studies start to bear fruit.

But what is non-negotiable is the need to protect this part of Singapore from being impacted by rising sea levels. The land that we create and what we make of the land is something we can take some time to discuss and decide. In fact, maybe even leave it to the future generation to decide what they want to use this land for.

It is not the case in Singapore that when we reclaim land, every single square inch will be for economic gain. In fact, at the Marina area – Marina South, Marina Bay, there is a very huge park there. East Coast, there is housing, there are amenities, but a large part of it is left for a beautiful park. There are other parts of Singapore, which were reclaimed and where nature has made its home again, and rich biodiversity nestles in areas which were formerly artificially reclaimed from the sea.

There are all these considerations that will be brought to bear. The key thing is to remember that we have a long journey ahead of us. Your ideas are coming at a very early stage, and we want you to continue to walk this journey with us for as long as you can. Because I can imagine a couple of years down the road, maybe you will be here in this room again. We will be presenting the data to you, presenting the challenges, comparing what you and we had said today and a few years later. Have we changed our minds, have our views matured, have they changed, have they evolved.

The economic climate down the road will be different. The key is, do we have faith that we are able to see this through to completion, because if we cannot stay the course for the next few decades, this ‘Long Island’ will not become a reality. And then we will be at the mercy of the full fury of climate change, including rising sea levels.

But for climate change, ‘Long Island’ and other solutions that will eventually have to be developed for other parts of Singapore are not the only solutions. We are widening and deepening drains, putting in stormwater retention tanks. We are raising parts of Singapore progressively as we raise the platform levels of land and making our buildings more weatherproof.

But that is for rising sea levels, and storm and flooding. There are also impacts in terms of water insecurity, food insecurity, and rising temperatures and its impact on liveability and our ability to continue to operate in the day under the sun. There will be impacts on vectors, transmissible diseases, and public health considerations. All these will be tremendous challenges that tiny Singapore will have to bear just like all other countries around the world, because of human action causing the climate to react in this way.

We will have to achieve our net zero targets by 2050, but we must also adopt significant climate adaptation strategies, just like what we have discussed today – ‘Long Island’. At the end of day when you talk about land use – and we do create land out of this – it is not the primary function of the ‘Long Island’ endeavour. The primary function is to mitigate sea level rise, but when we create opportunity like land, I think it is also very important to remember that we are a tiny island city state. 

As an island city state, we do not have the luxury to put necessary but undesirable things that a country or city needs to function outside our city. If you go to larger countries with hinterland, their pumping stations, incineration plant, military air bases that generate a lot of noise, all these can be put far outside the city, but not for us.

In fact, everything that a fully functioning sovereign state requires, everything that a city needs to function, has to be internalised within the boundaries of the city. Because outside the city is outside the country.

Our planning considerations, and the acuteness of our land planning trade-offs, is unrivalled and unparalleled. It is far greater than anywhere else on this earth because of our size, and because we are the only island city state, with all these challenges that we have to face.

Therefore, in all this planning, we have to plan long term and make sure we have the social capital to be able to commit; the emotional, the resource, and the fiscal impulse that is needed for us to see this project from start to finish.

Because this is not reclamation for the sake of creating opportunity through land. This is absolutely critical. And by the end of this century, we better get this up, because that element of national security is not for compromise, is not negotiable, for the sake of our continued existence.

I like once again to thank everybody, it has been a very good discussion. Please connect with the agencies so that you keep up to date with the developments over the next few years and maybe next few decades. Let us grow together with ‘Long Island’ for the sake of future generations.

Thank you all and good evening.