MFA Press Release: Transcript of Minister for Foreign Affairs Dr Vivian Balakrishnan's plenary address at the 4th Responsible Business Forum on Sustainable Development

Minister: Thank you, Tony. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. 2015 has been a landmark year for all of us who have concerns for sustainable development and climate change. Just two months ago, the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. And this December, 190 countries will again gather for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, hopefully, to work towards a universal agreement on climate change.  In fact, I will be flying off this Sunday to Paris for a preparatory meeting for the December Conference.

Sustainable development and climate change concern all of us.  But they are particularly salient for small island states, especially the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) who are amongst the most vulnerable in the world. And Singapore - 700 square kilometres, low-lying, 25% of our land reclaimed from the sea – we are acutely conscious of our vulnerability. Singapore is both a small island developing state and a city-state.  So in that sense, if you want concentration of risk, this is it.

And that is why our long-standing policy has been to pursue sustainable development, not as an ideology, but as a matter of practical consideration for long-term survival. And that’s also why we have always supported global efforts to reduce carbon emissions in a fair and sustainable way. We recognise it is our duty to our own citizens to prepare and build up resilience against the deleterious effects of climate change, if global agreements do not pan out.

The two key attributes that define Singapore’s approach to sustainable development are – first, pragmatism; and second, the belief in effective partnerships.

Let me deal with the first aspect – pragmatism.  The Singapore Government takes a practical approach that is focused on the long-term interest of the country even if it is initially unpopular. And we believe that there are three dimensions - a thriving economy, an inclusive society and a sustainable environment – these are all elements that are essential in order to create a virtuous cycle of development. And that’s worth repeating. A thriving economy - in other words, businesses have to survive and have to generate value. An inclusive society that remembers we are not here just to generate shareholder returns but that every citizen has a stake in the future. And third, a sustainable environment - because if you truly believe in democracy and if you realise that we all breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat the same food, then you need to believe in a sustainable environment for the long term. From the outset in Singapore, we knew that we could not run away from the challenges of rising urbanisation and sustainability, especially not in a land-scarce city. Our founding Prime Minister Mr Lee Kuan Yew had to make hard and painful decisions - counter-intuitive even - in order to ensure that our development did not come at the expense of the environment. He was a greenie before it became fashionable to be green. Let me give you an example. 50 years ago when Singapore was much less developed and our per capita GDP was one-tenth of what it is today, Mr Lee rejected cheap, dirty coal-fired power stations. He instinctively understood that there was value in having a blue sky, clear water and unpolluted land. In a sense because we are so small and we are so crowded, there is no forgotten backyard where you can dump your junk, where you can dump toxic waste. Everyone’s backyard is someone else’s front yard in Singapore and so we have a city-state that obsessively avoids pollution of our air, our water and our land.

Singapore has also leveraged technology to enable our different stakeholders to address climate change and our other environmental challenges. So, for instance, in our latest Sustainable Singapore Blueprint, our vision for Singapore would be a city that would be both smart and sustainable. We will introduce smart technologies in order to be able to sense in real-time our environmental parameters, to make data available in an open and transparent way to all stakeholders, and to reward people who are doing the right thing by providing value. Similarly, to also expose those who are achieving short-term benefits at the expense of everyone else.

Singapore aims to be a leading green economy where government and businesses work together in order to create an eco-system of supporting infrastructure and policies that will collectively enable us to be energy-efficient, to be water-efficient, to reduce carbon emissions, reduce waste and to reduce pollution. And these are not just ideological statements; remember that in Singapore these are essential for our survival.

The second attribute of our developmental journey has been the establishment of effective partnerships beyond Singapore.

In the early years of our nationhood, Singapore benefitted tremendously from the technical assistance and the cooperation from many international partners such as the World Bank and UN agencies. In the 70s and 80s, training programs with some multinational corporations also helped to raise the skills and the productivity of our workforce.  Even our early rollout of the sewage system in Singapore was also supported by a loan from the World Bank. One of the conditions of that loan, interestingly, was that the government at that time had to raise the tariffs for the delivery of water, and treatment of used water.

So to pay it forward, we started the Singapore Cooperation Programme (SCP) in 1992, and we now conduct around 300 courses per year for 7,000 officials from our fellow developing countries. This April, we welcomed our 100,000th participant of the SCP. When I visited New York in September, I announced a new Sustainable Development Programme under the SCP to support the 2030 Agenda. Through this Programme, Singapore will work with the UN agencies such as the UNDP to provide technical assistance to developing countries in order to further enhance their capacities in the areas of leadership and governance, the development of sustainable cities, water and sanitation solutions.

Although Singapore only accounts for about 0.11% of the world’s emission of greenhouse gases, we will not neglect our responsibility as a global citizen. In July, we submitted our INDC, the Intended Nationally Determined Contribution, to the UNFCCC Secretariat. Our commitment is to reduce our Emissions Intensity by 36% from 2005 levels by 2030, and we should stabilise our emissions with the aim of peaking around 2030 as well. Now mind you, this is not an easy target to achieve. Bear in mind the fact that we are entirely fossil fuel dependent. We do not have geothermal energy.  We don't even have enough solar energy. If you were to cover all buildings in Singapore with solar panels using current technology, we could generate at best 12-15% of our electricity needs. We have no typhoons, so it also means there is a limited amount we can harvest from the wind. Even our inter-tidal heights are limited. So there's a limit to how much we can generate from tidal energy. And because we don't have earthquakes and no volcanoes in Singapore (fortunately) - it also means we don't have access to geothermal energy. So the point I'm making is that the key and most effective strategy for Singapore in fact is conservation and energy efficiency. And hence our target, our declared INDC expressed in terms of Emissions Intensity.

Now, sustainable development issues cannot be addressed unilaterally. For the 2030 Agenda to work, we need the commitment and the concerted efforts of all stakeholders – by that I mean governments, civil society, and businesses. The people represented here in this room. And that’s why this forum is so relevant. Let me be frank, and perhaps undiplomatic. I know foreign ministers are supposed to be nice, smiley, diplomatic people. But since I used to be the Environment Minister, I can be frank. Brutally frank. The transboundary haze that has afflicted our region for far too long is a man-made tragedy and a crime.  A man-made tragedy and a crime. It would be bad enough if this was a natural disaster. We would all shake our heads, huddle together, reach out, help one another. But this is not a natural disaster. This is a deliberate, man-made tragedy. Vandalism against society, against the environment, and ultimately, against ourselves. It has impaired the health of millions of people, compromised the safety of aircraft, and damaged our regional economy. This year, it has been estimated that more than 2 million hectares of forests, a lot of which was growing on peatland – and you know that peatland represents millennia-worth of carbon captured in our ground – more than 2 million hectares of forests have been set alight.  Huge quantities of CO₂ have been released, estimated at around 1.6 billion tons of CO₂.  You know, it pains me to have to travel to Paris to negotiate global agreements, whilst right here in our backyard, we are releasing huge amounts of global greenhouse gases. It puts things in context. And, all this is happening because actually only a handful of people, a handful of big companies, are really profiting from this entire exercise at the expense of the environment and of the rest of society. This is a classic example of privatising the gain and socialising the pain.

We need a multi-faceted solution. At one level, the countries are individually trying to tackle transboundary haze. Within ASEAN, Indonesia has ratified the ASEAN Transboundary Haze Agreement and we have taken a multilateral approach to attempting to put out the recent fires. But we also need to intensify regional and international cooperation in order to apply effective legal and commercial pressure on these few errant companies so that they will stop their unsustainable and irresponsible land and forest clearing. The haze has also catalysed a growing demand for responsible and sustainable business practices. The Singapore Environment Council and the Consumers Association of Singapore recently stepped up their efforts to get leading retailers to declare that their products and their supply chains are derived from sustainable sources. This caused retailers to withdraw some products from their shelves and some companies have also received notices from the National Environment Agency pursuant to Singapore’s Transboundary Haze Pollution Act. These may be symbolic, it may not cost the companies a lot of money at this point in time, but I think it sends a very clear signal that enough is enough and that people are going to vote with their wallets and their feet. The Singapore government has also taken steps to review its procurement practices to see how we can support companies that have instituted sustainable practices and, as far as possible, this will take into account the practices not just of that particular company, but of your suppliers in your chain. We expect companies to be transparent about your supply chains, particularly those in the oil, palm oil and the forestry sectors, and we hope that others in the private sector will likewise practise sustainable procurement and be prepared to subject themselves to the transparency that is needed.

The growing chorus for responsible and sustainable business practices is not just a phenomenon peculiar to our region. In many places around the world - in the US, the EU, India and China - we see a rising trend of consumers wanting goods that are demonstrably sustainably produced and demanding greater accountability and transparency in the supply chains, and I think this is something to be welcomed. We hope that in response to this growing consumer movement and to the greater need for transparency that businesses will see that it is in their own long-term interest to move towards a more environmentally-friendly approach, characterised by enhanced transparency in the supply chain and procurement processes. At the end of the day, environmental protection, social responsibility and protecting the health of all stakeholders, citizens and employees, are really in the long-term interest of the companies themselves. Ultimately we also need to ensure that there is a price to be paid for damaging our health, damaging our environment and damaging the economy.

Sustainable development is not an optional luxury. You just watched that film. I sometimes have problems, when we overly anthropomorphise the problem - meaning, we think the universe spins around human beings. The universe and the earth have been around for billions of years, well before human beings came about. It is true that we now live in a day and age when humans do impact the earth and the environment.  But the earth and the environment will survive human beings. The issue is not the survival of the earth; the issue is the survival and the well-being of human beings. That is the real reason why all of us need to believe in sustainable development, in protecting our environment, and in responsible business practices. It’s actually about people and about human beings. So we need political will, we need the ability to investigate thoroughly, we need the willingness to enforce effectively, we need responsible business behaviour, we need ethical investors and we need vigilant consumers to pledge our common commitment towards a sustainable future, not for the sake just of Mother Earth but for the sake of our fellow brothers and sisters. Thank you all very much and I wish you a most enjoyable and fulfilling morning.

Thank you.

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