The Committee for Singaporean Superiority (CSS) is saddened by the findings of the recent Living Planet Report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF): in a list of countries with the largest ecological footprints Singapore ranked a miserable number seven.
Given that we pretty much top every list ever—from the Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel Top 10 to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s list of most expensive cities—news that Singapore isn’t at the forefront of depleting the world’s natural resources dampens SG50 excitement somewhat.
We don’t dismiss our nation’s achievements, of course. For a tiny island of five million people, number seven worldwide is no small feat.
“But it’s really unfair that we rank lower than Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait,” CSS chairperson Lee Kia Su Darlene said. “Sure, we rack up a bunch of points importing everything from water to salad greens, but it’s almost impossible to compete with building luxury oases in the desert. We will petition the WWF about the bias inherent in their methodology.”
Local, liberal grassroots movements are also undermining how truly awesome our carbon footprint could be: the population loosely called “hipsters” are largely to blame: they refuse plastic bags, they ride bicycles, they upcycle furniture and they don’t shave as often as other citizens. Local food producers, too, with their rooftop gardens and their locally made jams, nut butters and granolas, have put a small dent in our emissions (though luckily they still have to rely on raw materials from Malaysia).
Nevertheless, we are not discouraged. We at CSS are committed to topping the WWF list in future editions. With more condos, HDBs and malls in the works, and with a population set to rise to seven million in 15 years, it should be a piece of (imported) cake.
