"Singapore can do more to cut emissions, protect nature and safeguard human rights: UN expert", 24 May 2025

Singapore has made notable contributions to the global environmental movement, but it can do more to reduce its planet-warming emissions, protect nature and safeguard human rights, said a UN environment expert ...

…, Ms Astrid Puentes Riano, the UN special rapporteur on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, said: “Considering the triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and toxic pollution, Singapore can and must increase efforts to reduce demand of energy, water and resources.”

… On climate change, Ms Puentes Riano noted that Singapore contributes just 0.1 per cent of global carbon emissions.

But the average amount of carbon dioxide emitted by each person here remains significant, she said, pointing to how Singapore ranks 20th globally in terms of emissions per capita, based on a review of 156 countries or territories…

Beyond reducing reliance on natural gas, which accounts for about 95 per cent of the country’s electricity production, it is equally important for people in Singapore to reduce the demand for energy and water here, …

About 10 per cent of the global population is consuming and responsible for over half of carbon emissions, she added.

“We can’t continue with these levels of consumption. Singapore has a huge opportunity, because being one of the wealthiest countries in the world... there is a lot of space to not only think about economic growth as unlimited, but also consider the planetary boundaries,” Ms Puentes Riano said…

On nature, she noted that Singapore has lost most of its tropical primary forest and a “significant portion of its biodiversity, due to urban expansion and development”.

… However, care needs to be taken to ensure natural ecosystems are looked after even as the country continues to develop, Ms Puentes Riano said.

Citing the example of the future Long Island project, which involves reclaiming land at higher levels off East Coast and placing them in the form of islands to protect the coastline from sea-level rise, Ms Puentes Riano said: “It is of great importance to prevent and minimise impacts of ecosystems including in the face of new and upcoming projects such as the Long Island project.

“Impacts on the marine ecosystems need to be adequately assessed and prevented, as damage to ecosystems can be irreversible,” she added…

Reclamation projects need to be accountable for the impacts on the source countries that land materials come from, and developers should prevent and reduce reclamation’s impact on the Republic and abroad, Ms Puentes Riano stressed.

She added that findings from all environmental impact assessments (EIAs) should be publicly available, and this, alongside public engagements, should be coded into law…

She added: “One of the gaps here is that there is a lack of clarity about when EIAs are done, when (they are) published, what is published. There’s no clarity about whether all the environmental assessment done is published... and what (the stages are)…