The Heat Is on, Now We Must Act

Climate change is today one of the most pressing concerns. To quote from the recent United Nations (UN) Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal... The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.” As reported in the media, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has declared, “The heat is on... Now we must act.” To achieve global sustainability, we need a global mental change as an essential imperative condition to prevent the disastrous and irreversible deterioration in climate conditions. Sustainability requires complex in-depth and multi-faceted corrective processes in order to redress the broad range of unsustainability, including its ethical and value-loaded cultural dimensions. Presently, the city-state of Singapore is deeply embedded in Modernity's dominant modes of understanding reality, with economic and technical systems narrowly defining the logical linear orientated rationality. Reaching sustainability in Singapore is therefore an ambitious target. It will take time, radical readjustments, political commitment and broad-based support of the whole community. A deeper broad-based slower transformational process is a clear option. It is in this context that this article wishes to share some observations on Singapore – first, the selected challenges of sustainability in relation to A) a sustainable population, B) “fewer cars, fewer roads”, C) Third Space and D) the dynamic serendipity of the arts; and second, examples of development strategies towards a people-oriented sustainable environmental vibrancy.