Channel NewsAsia ran this story on 18 March 2009:
Merlion, S'pore Flyer among participants in Earth Hour Singapore
By Lynda Hong
SINGAPORE: More Singapore icons, landmarks and commercial buildings will be taking part in Earth Hour.
At 8.30pm on March 28, the Merlion, Singapore Flyer, Fullerton Hotel and the Esplanade will stand in darkness for one hour in support of the fight against climate change.
Shopping malls like Raffles City, Plaza Singapura, Bugis Junction and Junction 8 have also committed to switching off their facade lights during Earth Hour.
Office buildings like Capital Tower, One George Street and Robinson Point, as well as some service apartments will also support the green cause.
In Singapore, organisers have a target of one million participants.
So far, only about 2,000 people and 350 companies have registered on the website to do their part for the environment.
But organisers believe there'll be thousands out there taking part in Earth Hour in their own way and tracking numbers can only be done after the event is over.
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Singapore Prepares To Gobble Up Its Last Village
This article appeared in The New York Times on January 3, 2009.
By Seth Mydans
SINGAPORE — It is Singapore’s secret Eden, a miniature village called Kampong Buangkok that is hidden in trees among the massed apartment blocks, where a fresh breeze rustles the coconut palms and tropical birds whoop and whistle.
With just 28 houses in an area the size of three football fields, it is Singapore’s last rural hamlet, a forgotten straggler in the rush to modernize this high-rise, high-tech city-state. But apparently not for much longer. Kampong Buangkok is designated by the government for demolition and redevelopment, possibly in the near future. When it is gone, one of the world’s most extreme national makeovers will be complete.
Kampong is a local word for village and also defines a traditional rural way of life that Singapore has left behind.
“The big overhaul began in the early 1960s,” said Rodolph de Koninck, a professor of geography at the University of Montreal and one of the authors of “Singapore: An Atlas of Perpetual Territorial Transformation,” which graphically charts a half-century of change.
As the decades passed, a clamorous tropical settlement reinvented itself as a spic-and-span outpost of the developed world.
Now 90 percent of Singapore’s population has been moved into government housing, and many people have moved at least once again as the city continues to change.
“Everything is up for redevelopment,” Mr. de Koninck said. “Even downtown, things that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s are already being torn down.”
When Sng Mui Hong’s father bought the land in 1956, Kampong Buangkok was a muddy village like hundreds of others around Singapore. No one could have guessed that it would be the last.
Under the city’s master plan, at an unannounced date Kampong Buangkok will be “comprehensively developed to provide future housing, schools and other neighborhood facilities,” said Serene Tng of the Urban Redevelopment Authority in an e-mail message.
Ms. Sng, 55, is now the landowner, wheeling her bicycle among the metal-roofed, one-story homes of her tenants, who are also her friends and pay only nominal rents for their houses.
The government provides electricity, running water and trash collection, and once a day a postman comes by on his motorcycle.
Ms. Sng grew up here, and many of her neighbors were her childhood companions. Few people in Singapore of her generation can say that.
Fruits and flowers cluster in the village like endangered species in a vanishing ecosystem. There are tiny guavas and giant papayas, yams and tapioca plants, dill and edible bamboo shoots, bougainvillea and hibiscus.
Snakes and lizards scurry through the undergrowth, and tiny fish swim in a tiny stream.
Through the trees in all directions, the people of Kampong Buangkok can glimpse the government housing blocks that represent their future.
Under Singapore law, the government can buy the land at any time, at a designated price, and Ms. Sng has already prepared herself.
“If there’s a change, I won’t have my friends any more,” she said, but added: “We must not cling on to things. If the government wants to take the land, they will take it.”
There is no question that Singapore needs the land.
Its population, which was 1.6 million in 1960, has grown to 4.8 million living in an area less than 300 square miles, one of the world’s highest population densities. Planners project a growth of nearly 40 percent by midcentury, to 6.5 million.
“We will need to optimize land use, whether it is though reclamation, building upwards or using subterranean space,” Minister of National Development Mah Bow Tan said recently, in describing the plans for population growth.
To make more space, neighborhoods are razed, landmarks are sacrificed and cemeteries — an inefficient use of land — are cleared away, the buried remains cremated and placed in vaults.
In its most ambitious development project, Singapore has simply made itself bigger. In 1957 its land area was 224 square miles. Since then vast amounts of landfill, dumped into the sea, have expanded it by more than one-third, to 299 square miles.
Few people in Singapore know that one village still survives, hidden in trees 200 yards from a highway.
“Even if I want to show my children how I was brought up I can’t show them,” said Ho Why Hong, 50, a taxi driver, as he searched for Kampong Buangkok. “Everything is torn down.”
“When we were growing up we didn’t lock our doors,” he said. “That kind of trust we had. Everyone knew each other. Any stranger who came into the kampong, we knew.”
In modern Singapore, few neighbors know each other, said Sarimah Cokol, 50, who grew up in Kampong Buangkok and now lives in one of the apartments that people here call pigeonholes.
“Open door, close door,” she said in the terse speech of no-nonsense Singapore. “After work, go in. Close door.”
By Seth Mydans
SINGAPORE — It is Singapore’s secret Eden, a miniature village called Kampong Buangkok that is hidden in trees among the massed apartment blocks, where a fresh breeze rustles the coconut palms and tropical birds whoop and whistle.
With just 28 houses in an area the size of three football fields, it is Singapore’s last rural hamlet, a forgotten straggler in the rush to modernize this high-rise, high-tech city-state. But apparently not for much longer. Kampong Buangkok is designated by the government for demolition and redevelopment, possibly in the near future. When it is gone, one of the world’s most extreme national makeovers will be complete.
Kampong is a local word for village and also defines a traditional rural way of life that Singapore has left behind.
“The big overhaul began in the early 1960s,” said Rodolph de Koninck, a professor of geography at the University of Montreal and one of the authors of “Singapore: An Atlas of Perpetual Territorial Transformation,” which graphically charts a half-century of change.
As the decades passed, a clamorous tropical settlement reinvented itself as a spic-and-span outpost of the developed world.
Now 90 percent of Singapore’s population has been moved into government housing, and many people have moved at least once again as the city continues to change.
“Everything is up for redevelopment,” Mr. de Koninck said. “Even downtown, things that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s are already being torn down.”
When Sng Mui Hong’s father bought the land in 1956, Kampong Buangkok was a muddy village like hundreds of others around Singapore. No one could have guessed that it would be the last.
Under the city’s master plan, at an unannounced date Kampong Buangkok will be “comprehensively developed to provide future housing, schools and other neighborhood facilities,” said Serene Tng of the Urban Redevelopment Authority in an e-mail message.
Ms. Sng, 55, is now the landowner, wheeling her bicycle among the metal-roofed, one-story homes of her tenants, who are also her friends and pay only nominal rents for their houses.
The government provides electricity, running water and trash collection, and once a day a postman comes by on his motorcycle.
Ms. Sng grew up here, and many of her neighbors were her childhood companions. Few people in Singapore of her generation can say that.
Fruits and flowers cluster in the village like endangered species in a vanishing ecosystem. There are tiny guavas and giant papayas, yams and tapioca plants, dill and edible bamboo shoots, bougainvillea and hibiscus.
Snakes and lizards scurry through the undergrowth, and tiny fish swim in a tiny stream.
Through the trees in all directions, the people of Kampong Buangkok can glimpse the government housing blocks that represent their future.
Under Singapore law, the government can buy the land at any time, at a designated price, and Ms. Sng has already prepared herself.
“If there’s a change, I won’t have my friends any more,” she said, but added: “We must not cling on to things. If the government wants to take the land, they will take it.”
There is no question that Singapore needs the land.
Its population, which was 1.6 million in 1960, has grown to 4.8 million living in an area less than 300 square miles, one of the world’s highest population densities. Planners project a growth of nearly 40 percent by midcentury, to 6.5 million.
“We will need to optimize land use, whether it is though reclamation, building upwards or using subterranean space,” Minister of National Development Mah Bow Tan said recently, in describing the plans for population growth.
To make more space, neighborhoods are razed, landmarks are sacrificed and cemeteries — an inefficient use of land — are cleared away, the buried remains cremated and placed in vaults.
In its most ambitious development project, Singapore has simply made itself bigger. In 1957 its land area was 224 square miles. Since then vast amounts of landfill, dumped into the sea, have expanded it by more than one-third, to 299 square miles.
Few people in Singapore know that one village still survives, hidden in trees 200 yards from a highway.
“Even if I want to show my children how I was brought up I can’t show them,” said Ho Why Hong, 50, a taxi driver, as he searched for Kampong Buangkok. “Everything is torn down.”
“When we were growing up we didn’t lock our doors,” he said. “That kind of trust we had. Everyone knew each other. Any stranger who came into the kampong, we knew.”
In modern Singapore, few neighbors know each other, said Sarimah Cokol, 50, who grew up in Kampong Buangkok and now lives in one of the apartments that people here call pigeonholes.
“Open door, close door,” she said in the terse speech of no-nonsense Singapore. “After work, go in. Close door.”
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Food Court Outlet to Introduce Biodegradable Disposables
Channel NewsAsia ran this story today:
Come this weekend, ordering your food to dine in or takeaway may leave less of a carbon footprint than in the past.
Import and distribution company CornWare is introducing biodegradable disposable wares.
Made from corn, the prices of these products are comparable to their plastic and styrofoam counterparts.
One outlet of the food court chain Banquet will be using the biodegradable disposable wares from this weekend.
Olive Green Marketing is working with Banquet's other food courts to introduce them at more outlets.
Banquet says the charges for takeaways remain unchanged at 20 cents.
"The biodegradable disposables are carbon neutral. Carbon neutrality is quite a simple concept in the sense that the amount of carbon dioxide that it releases upon incineration in Singapore is at most 32 per cent, as compared to the amount of carbon dioxide released by styrofoam and plastics which is almost 100 per cent," said the executive director of Olive Green Marketing, Aloysius Cheong.
Come this weekend, ordering your food to dine in or takeaway may leave less of a carbon footprint than in the past.
Import and distribution company CornWare is introducing biodegradable disposable wares.
Made from corn, the prices of these products are comparable to their plastic and styrofoam counterparts.
One outlet of the food court chain Banquet will be using the biodegradable disposable wares from this weekend.
Olive Green Marketing is working with Banquet's other food courts to introduce them at more outlets.
Banquet says the charges for takeaways remain unchanged at 20 cents.
"The biodegradable disposables are carbon neutral. Carbon neutrality is quite a simple concept in the sense that the amount of carbon dioxide that it releases upon incineration in Singapore is at most 32 per cent, as compared to the amount of carbon dioxide released by styrofoam and plastics which is almost 100 per cent," said the executive director of Olive Green Marketing, Aloysius Cheong.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Singapore's Carbon Emission Sky High
Human Development Report has released its latest report on Singapore @ hdrstats.undp.org/countries/country_fact_sheets/cty_fs_SGP.html.
Under the section Climate Change, it says:
With 0.1% of the world's population, Singapore accounts for 0.2% of global emissions - an average of 12.3 tonnes of CO2 per person. If all countries in the world were to emit CO2 at levels similar to Singapore's, we would exceed our sustainable carbon budget by approximately 453%.
High-income OECD countries meanwhile lead the league of "CO2 transgressors". With just 15% of the world’s population, they account for almost half of all emissions. If the entire world emitted like High-income OECD countries -an average of 13.2 tonnes of CO2 per person, we would be emitting 6 times our sustainable carbon budget.
Singapore has signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol. As a non-Annex I Party to the Protocol, Singapore is not bound by specific targets for greenhouse gas emissions.
Under the section Climate Change, it says:
With 0.1% of the world's population, Singapore accounts for 0.2% of global emissions - an average of 12.3 tonnes of CO2 per person. If all countries in the world were to emit CO2 at levels similar to Singapore's, we would exceed our sustainable carbon budget by approximately 453%.
High-income OECD countries meanwhile lead the league of "CO2 transgressors". With just 15% of the world’s population, they account for almost half of all emissions. If the entire world emitted like High-income OECD countries -an average of 13.2 tonnes of CO2 per person, we would be emitting 6 times our sustainable carbon budget.
Singapore has signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol. As a non-Annex I Party to the Protocol, Singapore is not bound by specific targets for greenhouse gas emissions.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
