4 New Measures to Speed Up S’pore’s Goal of Becoming A Clean, Green, Sustainable City by 2030

Besides red, there’s another colour that’s used to describe Singapore.

Green.

At almost every corner of the island, rows of trees can be a common sight, as well as being huge on recycling.

Fines involving littering or even chewing gum are pretty high, showing how seriously we take being green.

In fact, by 2030, Singapore aims to be even more clean, green and sustainable. Here are four measures that’ll help in that.

Peak Carbon Emissions By 2025

Global warming will be an ever-present problem till the end of time.

However, Singapore is aiming to speed up its fight against it.

Emissions from government-owned offices and public infrastructure will hit the maximum by around 2025, Minister for Sustainability and the Environment Grace Fu said.

This is five years ahead of the national target to peak emissions in 2030.

The GreenGov.SG initiative will see the public sector taking the lead in environmental sustainability in three other areas.

These include government-owned offices, public sector infrastructures and healthcare facilities.

Ms Fu said another practice public sectors will have to adopt is green procurement.

Simply put, it’s buying goods and services that minimise negative environmental impacts.

The Government will also aim to build a culture of sustainability and grow the movement among public service officers.

More details on various sustainability plans can be found here.

These are part of the Singapore Green Plan 2030, for our island to have net-zero carbon emissions ASAP.

No More New Diesel Cars By 2025

You’re probably seeing the header and realising how soon that date is.

On 4 March, Thursday, Transport Minister Ong Ye Kung announced that no more new diesel cars and taxis can register in Singapore by 2025.

This comes despite the original plan for this to happen around 2030.

He said that motor vehicles in Singapore emit about 6.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

However, if light vehicles all ran on electricity, it could apparently be reduced to 1.5 to two million tonnes per year.

For passenger cars, 2.9 per of the 634,042 of them ran on diesel in 2020.

Way more taxis are diesel-powered, with 41.5 per cent of them being so at the end of 2020, out of 15,678 of them.

However, 95.8 per cent of 140,783 goods vehicles and 99.4 per cent of 18,912 buses run on diesel.

Light commercial vehicles also constitute 68.9 per cent of all goods vehicles.

This is why, in April, a new Commercial Vehicle Emissions Scheme is happening designed in part to persuade owners of said vehicles to find clean-energy alternatives.

Road Tax For Electric Cars Lowered In 2022

Speaking of cleaner alternatives…

There would soon be another incentive to using an electric car: the sweet reduction of road tax.

To be exact, it’ll be lowered till it’s about the same as those that run on combustion engines.

Currently, the tax for electric models is still more, despite the prices lowering around 40 per cent in January this year.

This price difference is especially true for cars between 90kW and 230kW.

LTA will merge the current electric car road tax bands of 30kW to 90kW and 90kW to 230kW, subjecting them to the lower band of the current road tax formula.

For those who want to purchase an electric vehicle (EV), the minimum registration fee of $5,000 will be removed from Jan 2022.

In anticipation of more of such vehicles, 60,000 charging points are to be constructed by 2030.

40,000 will be in public and HDB carparks while the remaining 20,000 will be on private premises.

For non-landed private residences, an EV common charger grant will be set up.

This will be made available to the first 2,000 chargers installed from July 2021.

The Government also aims to have the following eight-towns EV ready by 2025.

• Ang Mo Kio
• Bedok
• Choa Chu Kang
• Jurong West
• Punggol
• Queenstown
• Sembawang
• Tengah

Mr Ong says he will touch on the subject of luxury EVs another time, and wants all HDB towns to be EV-ready by 2030.

New Parks & Energy Efficient Buildings

But you simply car-not make a country more environmentally friendly with just new vehicles.

So, over the next six years, new parks and energy-efficient buildings will develop as well.

Research and development will also lean towards sustainability, National Development Minister Desmond Lee said.

130ha of new parks and redevelopment of another 170ha of existing parks will take over the next six years, having more vegetation and natural landscapes.

The goal is by 2026, such parks would exceed even botanic gardens by four times.

And we all know that the latter isn’t even small.

Within 10 to 15 years, a total of 1000ha of green space is expected to be added.

Mr Lee mentioned 50 per cent more land will be for nature parks, providing some 200ha of new nature parks.

Park connectors will also be expanded with new recreational routes across the island, up to 500km.

These aim to be done by 2030, along with households being within a 10-minute walk from a park.

When unveiling the fourth edition of the Singapore Green Building Masterplan, there were three targets:

• 80 per cent of all buildings by gross floor area (GFA) will be greened. It is currently 43 per cent.
• 80 per cent of all new developments by GFA will be classified as super low energy buildings. Energy efficiency is to improve by 60 per cent compared to 2005.
• Best-in-class green buildings will see an 80 per cent improvement in energy efficiency compared to 2005 levels.

In the 2020 Budget debate, the 10-year HDB Green Towns Programme was also announced.

The aim is to cool HDB towns, reduce energy consumption and recycle rainwater.

Over 5,700 HDBs are planned to have solar panels installed within the next few years too.

You can read more about these energy-efficient and R&D plans here.

Feature Image: IamDoctorEgg/ Shutterstock.com