Green inspiration in Singapore
In Singapore, you’ll discover lots of ideas on how your club can protect the environment — not just in convention breakout sessions but all around the city. The small island nation wants to inspire the world with its innovations to address climate change and displays its green creativity at most every turn: Plants cover building faces and rooftops to cool the structures, and parks are abundant, with a goal that every resident can walk to one within 10 minutes.
Getty Images
Officials from the city-state hosting the 2024 Rotary International Convention call it a living laboratory aimed at reducing its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. Key milestones by 2030 are to plant 1 million trees, increase solar energy deployments 400 percent, cut about a third of waste to landfills, and freeze growth of internal-combustion vehicles.
Here are a few more environmental programs and plans in Singapore that might energize you: “closed-loop” water recycling to reuse every drop, conversion of incinerated waste into sand for construction, car-free town centers for walkers and cyclists with underground roads, vertical farming indoors to increase local food production, and microclimate modeling for development to strengthen wind corridors, position buildings for natural ventilation, and identify hot spots for greenery.
Singapore sees its green economy as an advantage that drives growth and new jobs. Commit to Sharing Hope With the World as a friend of the environment when you visit the “city in a garden” 25-29 May.
This story originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of Rotary magazine.