Jacinda Ardern's choice of Singapore as a climate partner is poor: Its interim climate goals are deemed 'critically insufficient' and it relies on gas to power its homes and industry.
Opinion: We’re making poor progress towards becoming a sustainable nation, judging by the latest results of the Global Green Economy Index. We rank only 25th in the world, trailing far behind the top five countries – Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, France and Denmark.
This is the 10th annual index compiled by Dual Citizen, a US-based consultancy; and it’s the most comprehensive yet covering 160 countries.
It measures their performance over the past 15 years against 18 metrics in four domains – climate change and social equity; environmental health; markets and ESG (sustainability) investing; and sector decarbonisation.
“Echoing similar analyses, the GGEI and its green economy measurement framework suggests a wide gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to net zero targets and countries’ emission reduction goals in the UN’s COP process,” says Jeremy Tamanini, Dual Citizen’s founder.
Our next worst domain is climate change and social equity, with the two subjects paired to give a rough measure of how just a transition a country’s making to sustainability. We rank 49th on this category, dragged down by our greenhouse gas emissions per capita which are high because farming emissions account for half our total; and by our increasing income and wealth inequality.
On sector decarbonisation we rank 18th, with our strong showing on renewable electricity helping to offset our poorer performances on transport, manufacturing and construction emissions.
Our highest ranking is 12th on markets and ESG investment, thanks to good scores on green innovation (based on patent filings) and gender equality in governance (based on our high proportion of women MPs).
The Global Green Economy Index also recasts its data in two other illuminating ways. The good news is we rank 17th in the world on our “Distance” we’ve yet to travel to achieve sustainability (presumably helped by our substantial natural capital and what’s left of our social equity). But we rank 120th on “Progress” – in other words, we have gone backwards, not forwards, on many of our sustainable economic, environmental and social measures over the past 15 years.
“Today, agriculture is one of the largest contributors to climate change, generating about a quarter of total greenhouse gas emissions. Over the past 50 years, emissions from the sector have nearly doubled; the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation expects this figure to increase by an additional 30 percent by 2050.” – Temasek, Singapore
As a nation we seem rather confused on many aspects of this, as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern demonstrated on her visit to Singapore this week. One of her key achievements there was adding a fifth pillar on “climate change and the green economy” to the existing ones in the New Zealand-Singapore Enhanced Partnership she signed on her previous trip in 2019.
It’s absolutely the right, and long overdue, new focus for us, given our seriously lagging performance on climate and sustainability. But Singapore is a poor choice of partner for a number of reasons:
► Its interim climate goals are unconscionably weak and it is aiming to be net zero only by 2060. India, which has a vastly tougher task, aims to be only a decade behind Singapore.
► Its climate goals and policies earn the worst ranking – “critically insufficient” which is consistent with a greater than 4C rise in temperature – from Carbon Action Tracker. (By comparison, we’re rated in the next worst category, “highly insufficient”)
► Singapore was one of the few wealthy countries that failed to increase its climate commitments at COP26 last November in Glasgow, along with Australia.
► It enthusiastically signs up to UN climate pledges in which it has no skin in the game, such as coal-fired electricity generation.
► Some 95 percent of its electricity is generated by burning natural gas (versus 85 percent of ours coming from renewable sources); and while it’s pushing ahead with solar power and plans to import some clean electricity from neighbouring countries it reckons it will take a long time to decarbonise its electricity sector.
On the positive side, Singapore has demanding requirements on its buildings for energy efficiency and incorporating green plantings in them. We need urgently to do both with our buildings. As it happens, we have the expertise right here in New Zealand thanks to Beca, the consulting engineers, being deeply involved in such projects in Singapore.
And we could learn a lot from Singapore’s big strategic push into new and deeply sustainable food technologies. As Temasek, Singapore state’s main investment vehicle, says:
“Today, agriculture is one of the largest contributors to climate change, generating about a quarter of total greenhouse gas emissions. Over the past 50 years, emissions from the sector have nearly doubled; the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation expects this figure to increase by an additional 30 percent by 2050.”
So far Temasek has invested more than US$8 billion in more than 40 food tech pioneers such as Impossible Foods, which makes plant-based meat substitutes, and Perfect Day, which bio-brews animal-free dairy foods.
Two years ago, our government set up with Singapore government agencies a $12 million, three-year future foods programme. Four NZ research entities are participating in it. But their projects are very specific and in no way play to the big food tech opportunities Singapore offers.
Likely, our entrenched animal farmers would fight greater participation in non-animal foods, just as they are fighting against any meaningful reduction in farming’s greenhouse gas emissions.
But if our government is serious about the green economy, it would encourage, cajole and push our farmers to commit at last to playing their critical role in tackling the climate crisis. Diversifying into non-animal foods is one of the solutions but the far more fundamental one is regenerative agriculture practices. Ultra-urban Singaporeans will be little help on those.
