Singapore fails to keep pace with wealthy peers on carbon emissions

Sustainable development goals are high on the agenda for many governments worldwide after being officially adopted by 193 countries at the UN summit in 2015. The Financial Times has analysed data released by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy, which recorded individual country performance across 11 categories.

On the issue of climate change, the countries were ranked based on their performance between 2008 and 2017. Several indicators are factored into the Environmental Performance Index score, with the largest being the average annual rate of carbon dioxide emissions growth, which makes up 55 per cent of the overall climate change score.

The majority of wealthy developed countries have made significant progress over the 10-year period. The reduction in the reliance on coal as a source of electricity has been the primary contributor to this.

Singapore, however, has failed to keep pace with the progress of its wealthy peers. The data show that its CO2 emissions growth rate was the third worst of any, after Burundi and Niger.

This has been exacerbated due to deforestation, which led to the country going from a net carbon absorber to a net emitter, from 2012 to 2014.

The Climate Action Tracker project — an independent scientific analysis produced by two research organisations tracking climate action since 2009 — noted that while Singapore had announced four Covid-19 stimulus packages by June 2020 that were worth 19 per cent of GDP, there was no indication they were aligned with the Paris Agreement or Singapore’s low-emissions strategy.

“Singapore was already on track to substantially overachieve its very weak 2020 and 2030 targets, without implementing any additional policies,” it said, rating its carbon emission reduction targets as “highly insufficient”.