The haze – and what a difference three weeks make
Our skies were blue and the air crystal clear today.
Had a long discussion in Parliament on the cause of the haze and our plans for the future. I thanked Singaporeans for your calmness, patience, and the fact that you refused to get rattled by the situation. It is that ability to respond sensibly, rationally, cohesively and collectively as a people that makes the difference and makes me confident that we will get through this together, whatever happens.
Sustainable development makes good business sense, especially in Singapore
The world is currently at several inflexion points. There are now more than seven billion human beings on the planet, and more than half of us live in cities. Indeed, the most essential elements of life – food, water – are now interlinked with energy, and with fossil fuels. And this portends therefore, either a potential crisis or enormous opportunities for businesses in the years ahead.
In the past, great fortunes were made by simply extracting resources, mining materials – iron ore and energy – from the ground. And manufacturing grew enormously, on the back of the availability of cheap resources and cheap energy. But this era of cheap natural resources is coming to a close. And we can now no longer afford to ignore the externalities of industrialisation and of human activities. Pollution and global warming are real phenomena, which affect not just the quality of the environment, but also involves huge economic costs for all of us. In other words, the old ways of getting rich are not going to be viable in the future.
Our world is changing profoundly at an unprecedented rate. We need a coalition of the government, private companies and NGOs to protect human welfare, the fragile ecosystem and biodiversity. We have to get the economics right too.
Transcript of my speech at the launch of the “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Business Coalition” at the Singapore Botanic Gardens on 6 November 2012
We live in a world, which perhaps unwittingly, has gone through a series of inflexion points at a rate which is unprecedented. Let me cite a few of these.
First, our world population has now exceeded seven billion. Clearly, that is unprecedented. Not only that, but for the first time ever in human history, more than half of all human beings live in a city, and not in the rural countryside. This is another world first.