A city in nature – or a city without nature? The uncertain fate of Singapore’s last forests

When a developer flattened a piece of woodland earlier this year that it wasn’t meant to, aerial photos of the stripped parcel of land went viral and lit up social media in the city-state.

Photographs from 2019 — picturing Singapore’s historical railway flanked with luscious green woodland — were juxtaposed with photographs of barren land taken in February 2021, shocking both the public and environmentalists.

The area was always going to be cleared to some extent. About 25 hectares of the 70-hectare woodland had been slated for the development of an Agri-Food Innovation park.

The appointed contractor mistakenly cleared 4.5 hectares of land before the environmental impact assessment could be completed in April. Notwithstanding that, the Nature Society Singapore (NSS) had in its 2019 book, The Green Rail Corridor - A Biodiversity and Ecological Overview, recorded a host of thriving bird species in the area.

The forest clearance highlighted a tenuous relationship between the government and local nature groups which was improving in recent years. Many Singapore residents spoke-out against the error, underlining a growing shift in attitudes towards the city-state’s green spaces that have been sacrificed in the name of development. 

In the past year, spells of solitary lockdowns to stem rising Covid-19 infections have driven hoards to Singapore’s natural spaces. Dormant building sites and restricted maintenance in public spaces allowed for explosions of rare wilderness, inspiring an interest in nature in a meticulous metropolis.

Most Singaporeans — who have lived in high-rise apartment blocks since the 1960s, when rustic village settlements known as kampongs still common in neighbouring Malaysia and Indonesia were replaced with concrete and steel — have accepted the conversion of forests to buildings in the name of economic progress and pragmatism that has become a hallmark of Singapore’s government. But there are signs that this pragmatism — at the cost of the city’s natural spaces —  is drawing concern from both the public and conservation groups alike.

“I have witnessed a remarkable shift [in environmental consciousness], from ambivalence to something more than that. Societal attitudes are changing,” says David Tan, a forest ecologist who has scrutinised the Kranji deforestation incident with detailed analysis posted on social media.

Hidden areas of natural beauty captured by drone footage have similarly gone viral in recent months. These same areas are earmarked for development for public housing, prompting more people to question land-use decisions of the country. The tension between protecting wild spaces and development plagues most of the world’s cities as more people pour into urban areas. The Kranji clearing encapsulates this more than most.

Over the past 10 years, the rate at which wild areas have disappeared has been slow compared to the rampant forest loss in the neighbouring Malaysian district of Johor, which conservationists say has prompted animals such as crocodiles, otters and hornbills to migrate south to Singapore. 

But in a country with so little greenery left, every patch of forest left matters. From Selimang Woods in the north to Sentosa Island in the south and in scattered patches in between, islands of greenery are quietly shrinking to make way for development (see map).

These losses could count more for a country that is heating twice as quickly as the global average. Singapore is almost one degree Celsius hotter now than it was in the 1950s — a big increase considering the planet has warmed by one degree since the industrial revolution around 1750.

Singapore is also much hotter — 4 °C hotter — in built up areas compared to green spaces, and a Singapore that is projected to get as hot as 35 to 37 °C by the end of the century could be a dangerous place to live.

Professor Benjamin Horton of the Earth Observatory of Singapore questions whether the labourers that play such a pivotal role in the country’s economy will be able to work outside in such hot weather. Thousands of construction workers have been worked to death building stadiums in temperatures reaching 45°C for the 2022 Fifa World Cup in Qatar. “We need to make urban areas more resilient, and greenery in the city is one way to cool it down,” says Horton.

There have been no formal studies on how land-use change in Singapore has affected the local climate. Nor have there been studies on how small the remaining patches of forest can get before they stop functioning well as suitable habitats for wildlife. Though plans have been announced to connect some patches of greenery, such as in the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve in the northwest of the island, ecologist David Tan worries that some areas will become so small, fragmented and far apart that species will start inbreeding.

One patch of forest known as Clementi forest flanks the rail corridor that links the Central Catchment Nature Reserve with the southern ridges, allowing animals such as pangolins, civets and tree shrews to move around. If the planned development of Clementi forest goes ahead, an important passageway for wildlife will be blocked, says Tan, who modelled ecological connectivity in Singapore as an undergraduate. Similarly, Tengah, which is being developed into an “eco town”, is a large patch of forest that connects the Western Catchment with the Central Catchment that is being compromised as a wildlife corridor, he says.

Dr Ho Hua Chew of Nature Society Singapore says there is little point talking about connectivity, if what’s left is being lost. “The forest has to be there to be connected,” he says. Ho worries that the 10-year land-use master plan laid out years ago will mean few if any of Singapore’s unprotected forests, which make up 20 per cent of the island’s green areas, will be spared development. Any patch of forest can be used at any time, as all land is state-owned. 

Singapore’s Ministry of National Development says it is building a network of corridors to strengthen the connections between nature reserves, parks and gardens, and is planting native trees and shrubs to create “forest-like structures” alongside roads known as “nature ways”, while also beefing up park connectors.

Island-wide studies will also be conducted to understand the ecology of green areas and how to connect them to “inform our long-term planning,” a spokesperson tells Eco-Business.

NParks also lists a number of measures it has taken to improve connectivity, including Southeast Asia’s first eco-bridge, built in 2013 to enable wildlife to cross the Bukit Timah Expressway between Bukit Timah and Central Catchment nature reserves. Roadkill has been a serious issue for Singapore’s wildlife, particularly since the construction of an expanded nature park in Mandai. Species such as Sunda pangolin, leopard cat and sambar deer have been killed on the road.

Conservationists believe that whatever forest remains should be protected, and not only to prevent extinctions to critically endangered species. Ho points to the value of forests as carbon sinks and providers of ecosystem services such as water and air filtration. Singapore sets aside about 10 per cent of its total land area for conservation, and plans to increase that to 12 per cent under the Singapore Green Plan. But that proportion is well below the 17 per cent of protected land set by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, to which Singapore is a signatory, Ho points out.

Unprotected forest patches are extra valuable considering that Singapore’s nature reserves are under threat too. Conservationists report that Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, which has been around since 1883, is in danger of degenerating. The public paths that cut into the reserve have the effect of drying out the 1.6 square kilometre rainforest, which is surrounded by a water pipeline, an expressway and dense suburban and commercial developments. Similar problems face the Central Catchment Nature Reserve.

“The main problem with our central forested nature reserve is that it is not an integrated whole. It has been fragmented over the decades by roads, water-pipeline paths, golf courses, and expanded reservoirs, and is increasingly being flanked closely by housing estates. This gives rise to greater edge-effects, such as de-humidification, pollution, and intrusion of domestic animals on the forest ecosystem,” Ho says.

Professor Shawn Lum, who penned a paper on Singapore’s nature reserves titled Resilience of a forest fragment exposed to long-term isolation in Singapore, says that the reserves have proved to be fairly resilient, as long as the fragments that make up our nature areas are “not too small and isolated.” But he does worry about the impact of wild pigs, which feed on young saplings in the reserves, and the impact of climate change, which has changed rainfall patterns.

The National Parks Board (NParks) and its 10-year Forest Restoration Action Plan, launched in 2019 to replant native trees and shrubs in disturbed areas and part of the OneMillionTrees Movement, is among the measures it is taking to prevent the degeneration of the reserves.

Pressure is mounting to change how the city-state assesses environmental impact before it decides to redevelop any plot of land, even as the nation continues to debate how to balance protecting its green spaces with needs for future housing. 

Responding to questions in parliament in February about the fate of Singapore’s unprotected forests in February, Minister for National Development, Desmond Lee, pointed to social trends that put continual pressure on land, the biggest being demand for public housing. 

“We need to continue building, to meet the demands and aspirations of young families,” he said, pointing out that for each new build-to-order (BTO) flat — Singapore’s most common public housing type — there are five to six applications as more Singaporeans enter marriageable age and look for a place of their own. More than 16,000 new flats are built every year.

Lee, himself a well-known naturalist, highlighted the compromise in Singapore's development story. “Given our small size, we have been, and have to be, judicious in stewarding our scarce land resources to support Singapore’s development, as well as in our aspiration to be a city in nature.”

“We have to constantly balance demands and trade-offs,” from housing to green spaces, he said. “These tensions are inherent in land use planning everywhere, but felt more acutely in a small city-state like Singapore.”

To conservationists like Leong Kwok Peng from the Nature Society of Singapore, a city in nature must mean conserving what’s left. “Most of it is earmarked for development. We need to keep it for as long as possible. We need to keep it for future generations,” he told Eco-Business at the launch of a campaign to preserve Pang Sua Woodland, a slither of forest that is also slated for development.

This may be difficult while loopholes exist in the current governance structures around construction and conservation in Singapore — one of the few countries in the world without a legally binding commitment to a planning tool deemed central to sustainable development: Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA). 

Indeed, Singapore stands alone in biodiversity-rich Southeast Asia, where all other countries have a formal and legally binding EIA system in place for major projects that may have significant environmental or social impact, writes Matthew Baird, an environmental lawyer from German think tank, Heinrich-Böll-Foundation, Southeast Asia. While Singapore has a system of environmental assessment for major projects this system is not formally enacted in a law or regulations, writes Baird. 

That said, some countries in the region struggle to fully implement these laws, according to Environmental Law in Singapore (2019) a book by Joseph Chun and Lin Heng Lye, which is considered the first comprehensive study of the subject.

Safeguarding nature 

EIAs evaluate the potential impacts of proposed development projects to ensure that they do not undermine critical resources and ecological functions, or the livelihood of the communities that depend on them. Such studies inform decisions on how to modify construction activity to reduce, if not avoid, unjustifiable environmental costs. 

Natalia Huang, an ecologist at Ecology Matters, a consultancy providing ecological advice and biodiversity studies for EIAs, surmised in an opinion article in The Straits Times in 2017 that the absence of an EIA law was to ensure that development would not be restricted.

Before EIAs became administrative practice in 2004, Singaporean authorities argued that the tiny, crowded city-state should be viewed in a different light to other countries and that environmental considerations were already catered for in its sophisticated city concept. Amid Singapore’s hunger for development and the decreasing availability of virgin building land, every square millimetre was considered prospective developable land, notes a paper on the issue.

While EIAs were carried out prior to 2004, this was reportedly done “in a random and ad hoc manner” according to a research paper by Clive Briffet and Jamie Mackee. In fact, much of the city was built without any biodiversity impact studies, particularly in its post-independence years, the research found. 

Lim Swee Say, the city-state’s then-Second Minister for National Development, cautioned in 2005 that placing EIAs and public participation in environmental decision-making on a legal footing would lead to “more dialogues and disagreements”. 

Government resistance to public participation meant that when EIAs were undertaken, it tended to be in secret, and only if the government deemed them necessary, despite open dialogue being widely considered a cornerstone of good environmental governance.

The practice of making assessment reports available for public comment, for instance, remained inconsistent until last year. When access was granted, the process was cumbersome. Often, only physical copies were made available for inspection, and could only be viewed during office hours by appointment. Copies were not permitted to be made. 

The government defended this practice by explaining that such studies were technical, voluminous documents that might not be easily understandable by the layman. But the barriers were considered a deliberate obstruction to the public, and gave rise to criticism of the government’s poor efforts in creating effective feedback channels. 

It is not enough for a developer to state that an assessment has confirmed there won’t be significant adverse environmental impacts, environmental law experts, Chun and Lye write in their book, other stakeholders must be given the opportunity to review the report. 

In 2008, the government introduced its first EIA framework in a bid to make development more environmentally friendly and while they have since become more commonly used, they are not yet mandatory. While stakeholders were increasingly given the opportunity to share feedback in subsequent years, doubts long lingered whether their concerns were taken seriously. 

Among those struggling to make their voices heard has been the country’s most prominent conservation group, Nature Society Singapore. Five years ago, the non-profit questioned an EIA of proposed development plans for the Mandai area in the north of the state and put forward alternative project sites and other proposals to mitigate the impacts of construction, but it never received a substantive public response from the developer or authorities. 

The government was reportedly “single-minded” in its plans, writes Chun, despite warnings that the project posed a grave threat to already fragmented and degraded forests in the nature reserve.

Over time, the country has paid for these blind spots in environmental governance. Briffett and Mackee suggest in their research paper that if Singapore had adopted environmental assessment legislation in the 1980s along with its neighbours Malaysia and Indonesia, some irreversible ecological damage, could have been averted.

Tentative change

It wasn’t until last year that authorities made a substantial effort to patch weak points in the EIA framework in an attempt to increase the rigour and transparency of biodiversity studies. One critical change involves the implementation of comprehensive guidelines for consultants to follow when conducting environmental surveys.

Consultants were previously left to decide for themselves what data should be collected and how to quantify the impacts of development work in the absence of standardised methodology. This meant that scopes varied across projects, and that evaluations were opaque and subjective.

For example, in 2016, an EIA of the Cross Island MRT Line —  a new 50-kilometre mass rapid transit line that will run from Jurong in the west to Changi in the east — classified the impacts of soil investigations under the nature reserve as “moderate” if mitigation measures were strictly followed. However, it wasn’t clear then what “moderate” meant.

The new framework also defines what counts as an area of high conservation priority, spelling out the circumstances under which biodiversity surveys must be done. 

The latest changes seek to render the planning process, and not just construction works, more sensitive to the environment and wildlife. Nature groups will now be engaged earlier in the process to facilitate preventive action, and development agencies will have to undergo a course on basic ecology to inform their planning strategies. 

Authorities also heeded calls for reports to be accessible for public scrutiny. The Ministry of National Development (MND), the agency responsible for land development in Singapore says that it will be making all environmental study reports publicly available, “unless there are security considerations” in an emailed response to questions from Eco-Business. Experts have lauded these steps, saying they bode well for the government’s future engagement with the public. 

In the wake of the Kranji clearing, authorities announced another review of the framework to see how similar blunders can be prevented in the future. The incident has also prompted agencies to take a closer look at how they work, both internally and with each other.

The government is mulling a centralised system to manage environmental impact assessment consultants instead of having individual developers manage their own. This could raise the bar for the consulting sector, which has been referred to as a “cowboy industry” due to the lack of regulations governing who can carry out such studies. There have been cases where this led to consultants doing surveys without possessing the necessary qualifications.

An MND spokesperson says that the government recognises the importance of stakeholder engagements further upstream in the planning and development process with efforts to build an “active partnership” with the public. 

“The government will continue building on these relationships with the nature community to foster greater stewardship of Singapore’s natural heritage,” according to the spokesperson. 

Current government policy requires projects to undergo a thorough evaluation process that determines the development’s potential impact on public health, heritage, and the environment, says the Urban Redevelopment Authority on its website. Projects close to sensitive nature areas are subject to greater scrutiny and “may be required” to conduct more detailed environmental studies, it says.

Amid pressure to legislate EIAs, the government has stressed that its current assessment framework has “regulatory teeth” as it is pegged to other legislation. The recently amended Wildlife Act, for instance, empowers NParks to issue wildlife-related requirements to developers and take direct enforcement action against companies that fail to comply. There is also the Planning Act, under which statutory permissions and conditions can be imposed for the conduct of biodiversity surveys.

The lack of a dedicated EIA law comes with certain risks, caution Chun and Lye. Since there is no judicial body that makes sure EIA policies are strictly enforced, there are no legal consequences if they are not. Neither are there guarantees that a potential future government reshuffle won’t erode measures currently in place. If current practices are not institutionalised, how can Singapore be certain that future regulators will apply them consistently?