Address climate change before we get hot under the collar

GOING by the first six months, 2016 is on track to set - for the third year in a row - another new high in global temperatures.

In fact, last month was the hottest June worldwide since records began in 1880, with a scorching start to summer in America and the Arctic ice cover down to a new low.

Weather extremes of increased intensity in recent times - Typhoon Haiyan, Hurricane Sandy being just the most prominent examples - underscore the global call to action to prepare for climate change, including committing to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that contribute directly to global warming. That global call, in the works for some 20 years, culminated late 2015 in the Paris talks where close to 200 nations (including Singapore) pledged to enact policies to reduce their carbon footprint in a collective bid to preserve the planet. As a tiny island city-state (though with an economic imprint well beyond its physical size), Singapore accounts for only 0.11 per cent of global emissions, according to official estimates. But it is doing its part, and more, to address climate change under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - not least because a small island state is more vulnerable to the calamitous effects of higher temperatures, more frequent and heavier storms, and rising sea levels that we are projected to experience in the decades ahead.