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Singapore to tackle food sustainability with its unique future plans

Fri 05 Nov 2021    
EcoBalance
| 3 min read

DUBAI: Singapore’s envious reputation as a garden city is about to get much greener, with ambitious plans to introduce more edible gardens to lessen the island state’s reliance on imported food, a World Majlis event on natural cities expressed at Expo 2020 Dubai.

Lim Eng Hwee, Chief Executive Officer, Urban Redevelopment Authority, Singapore, said, “We’re not trying to make Singapore a city in nature, we’re trying to bring nature into the city and restore nature. We have a goal of making ourselves not completely self-sustainable, self-sufficient, but to produce at least 30 per cent of our food needs.”

Held in collaboration with the Singapore Pavilion as part of Programme for People and the Planet’s Urban & Rural Development Week, Natural Cities: Preserving a Slice of Nature in Our Urban Spaces brought together a range of speakers from around the world to explore new ways of implementing more nature-centric urban planning.

Lim Eng Hwee said: “Because we are an island, we are a city and we are a country, all the needs of these three levels have to be met with limited land. At the same time, taking a long-term perspective, we can think about how to remain resilient.

“Singapore has one of highest population densities of any city in the world. But over the past five-and-a-half decades, we have managed to maintain up to 40 per cent of green cover. There are more than 2000 native plant species in Singapore and more than 400 bird species, so the richness of biodiversity in Singapore still exists.”

The forum also heard from Bjorn Low, Executive Director and Co-Founder, Edible Garden City, an urban farming social enterprise that has created more than 260 edible gardens in Singapore.

Bjorn Low said, “The very robust infrastructure that has been put to make [Singapore] into a garden city can be converted to make this into an edible garden city, through purposeful landscaping, through using autonomous knowledge and native food knowledge, planting the streetscapes with food-producing plants that are very suited to the environment. That could be a food-resiliency strategy for the future.

“What we see are not just edible gardens in terms of vegetables and herbs. What we see is the creation of social impact, environmental impact, and community bonding.”

Edible Garden City’s closed-loop farming solution was selected as one of 25 projects being showcased at Expo 2020 under the Global Best Practice Programme.

Addressing the forum virtually from Singapore, Desmond Lee, Singapore’s Minister for National Development, said that as the largest source of greenhouse emissions, cities “must lead the collective global effort to secure a more sustainable and livable future for the world”.

Desmond Lee said, “Our city nature vision is just our way of balancing nature conservation with urban development by weaving nature much more closely into our city … We are restoring and enhancing natural habitats and improving ecological connectivity between green spaces all across Singapore.”

Mun Summ Wong, Founding Director of WOHA and the architect behind the design of the Singapore Pavilion, said he hoped the plant-filled, net-zero energy building, covered with its distinctive three-dimensional garden, would inspire other sustainable solutions to urban development.

Mun Summ Wong said, “I think this is something that almost all cities and hopefully all countries could move towards greater degrees of self-sufficiency, so that we are not taking advantage of the planet.

“For me, the question is what we can do for nature. I do think we need to find a balance with nature and co-exist with nature. We are not the only living creatures on the planet and it’s necessary for us to acknowledge that.”

The event also heard from a range of other speakers, including celebrated British architect Asif Khan, the designer of a number of Expo 2020 architectural elements, including its Public Realm and acclaimed Entry Portals; Mahra Salem Alshamsi, Head of Urban Design, Dubai Municipality; and Jorge Perez-Jaramillo, former Director of Planning of Medellín, Colombia.

Urban & Rural Development Week is the third of 10 Theme Weeks being held over the six months of Expo 2020 Dubai.

Source: Expo 2020 website


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