Singapore seeks to be most environment-friendly state

By Kunda Dixit

Singapore (IPS) : Hundreds of trees and shrubs dot Singapore's sleek cityscape, but the tiny island republic wants to be greener.

Having attained Asia's second highest living standard, Singapore now wants to turn itself into the world's most environment-friendly country by the year 2000.

Singapore is already Asia's cleanest city. Its air quality is better than in most advanced nations, its rivers and lakes teem with fish and the average Singaporean lives to a ripe age of 76.

Much of this has been achieved with carefully-planned public campaigns used as an instrument for social engineering, such a circa 1970s program to transform Singapore into a `Garden City.'

Today, Singapore keeps itself spic and span with strict controls on vehicles and industries and an array of stiff fines for everything from littering to not flushing toilets.

To become a model green city by the year 2000, Singaporean officials are using a two-pronged massive education campaign to make the island republic's citizens environmentally conscious and to minimize wastage of resources and energy.

"We are fortunate that we started our environment protection programs early, but we cannot afford to slacken our efforts.," Singaporean environment minister, Abdullah Tarmugi, told journalists at a recent conference on urbanization.

Despite the fines, Tarmugi said, "Social habits like littering still persist. Stricter penalties cannot be the solution in the long-term."

Since the 1960s, Singapore's public health and environment campaigns have often been launched in war-footing and are named like military operations: `Keep Singapore Mosquito Free' and `The Clean Public Toilet Campaign.'

"While foreigners may be cynical about our fines on flushing toilets or chewing gum, it is true that public campaigns with punitive action and rewards have been highly definitive," says Victor Savage of the Singapore National University.

A media blitz coordinated with an education campaign in primary and grade schools have proved to be very potent tools for social engineering.

Says Savage, "The government has felt that the one of the best ways of bringing home the message to the family is by way of its children. Children listen to parents, but in Singapore the parents have also to listen to their children."

Wasteful

Singaporean officials now want to take the green campaign one notch higher by not only addressing issues like nature, recycling and noise pollution but also problems of wasteful consumerism.

"In our goal to make Singapore a model green city by the year 2000, we have to address the more fundamental issues of consumption habits and the values tied to a material society," says Tarmugi. "Unfortunately, the symbols of quality life in Singapore are too often associated with material goods."

Older Singaporeans who remember the time when the city was a colonial backwater with endemic tuberculosis and malaria shake their heads at a younger spendthrift generation that they say has taken affluence for granted.

At a convent school in Singapore, for instance, the principal shows a cabinet full of watches, wallets and other valuables that were lost by students who never came to collect them.

"By the 1980s, we had the basic infrastructure in place," says Yeo Boon Leng, chief engineer of strategic planning and research at the environment ministry. "But new global issues are beginning to impact on us."

Yeo sees several worrying trends: consumption and waste generation are soaring as incomes rise. And despite taxes that make cars in Singapore the most expensive in the world, the city's number of vehicles is rising.

The Singapore masterplan for the year 2000 calls for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, improving energy efficiency and keeping daily garbage production at one kg per person.

Singapore also wants to be a hub for green technologies for the Asia-Pacific region and eventually become an exporter of environment-friendly products.

Despite its small size, the 620 square kilometer island republic is setting aside five percent of its land area for nature reserves linked by nature corridors.

Critics of the Singapore plan, while applauding the moves to curb consumption, say the country is so microscopic that whatever is done here will have minimal impact regionally.

They say Singapore needs to look beyond its borders at the rampant destruction of rainforests in neighboring eastern Malaysia states of Sarawak and Sabah and in Indonesia.

Singapore is also a major transshipment point for timber exports and toxic wastes from industrialized nations bound for other countries in the region.

Conservationists are worried that the government's actions go against its green rhetoric. The government has decided to give permission to build a golf course that encroaches on a lake used by migratory birds.

A new breed of `Ugly Singaporean' also seems to have evolved -- Singaporeans who feel restricted by rules at home that they go on a littering rampage the minute they cross over into Malaysia.