Green buildings help in climate change fight
They may hold the key to reducing Singapore's carbon footprint as urban development continues apace with the property sector roaring back to life once again.
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IT is the year 2500 in Singapore. We travel with driverless cars, Mars is a much loved tourist spot, and robots live and walk among us as peers. One catch - we're all underwater, because sea levels have risen more than six metres, based on projections by some scientists.
Returning to present day, Singapore has just turned 52, and we probably should start thinking about how to avoid the above fate. Singapore's meteoric economic rise over many decades has launched a landscape of towering skyscrapers in the compact city-state and its buildings contribute to almost a quarter of all emissions here. Offices, shopping malls, hotels, education institutions and healthcare facilities consume almost a third of Singapore's electricity.
The greenhouse gases and carbon emissions generated by these power sources are contributing to climate change and changing the Singapore ecosystem's natural processes, at an increasingly alarming rate. The global fight against climate change is real, and Singapore - aptly nicknamed the Garden City - might just have the potential to combat it through technology and green building design.
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