A New Year, A New Hope
Dear friend,
Happy New Year from all of us at SG Climate Rally!
It’s been a busy year for all of us in the movement. We started off the year by making an intentional effort to educate and spread the concept of climate justice to a wider audience. Along the way, we supported our civil society partners by sharing more about the intersectional nature of climate justice in relation to issues such as labour rights, and gender equality.
Spreading our focus beyond Singapore, we also tried to create awareness about climate justice issues such as the Rempang Eco-City conflict, and of course the environmental injustice of the conflict in Gaza. We even found time to kick off our own podcast, Climate Kopitiam, touching on many of the above issues together with our friends and allies in the movement.
And, in addition to all these, we also held our second physical rally at Hong Lim Park! It was a herculean endeavour and we could not have pulled it off without all of your support, whether in manpower, moral, or financial. The message of climate justice is slowly spreading and we have seen some big wins in the past year, but we have not enacted sufficient policies to bring about a just and equitable transition both globally and in Singapore yet. Intersecting climate, economic, social, and political crises means that we’ll need to work even harder to ensure society’s most marginalised are protected from the effects of climate change.
The fight for stronger climate action must go on in 2024, and we can’t wait for you to see what we have planned! It’s going to be an important year (especially politically 👀), so stay tuned!
For a better world,
SG Climate Rally
Our series on the Global Stocktake is up on our Instagram! The result was a mixed bag (more on that below), but now that’s done and dusted, what matters most now is where we go from here. Our last post in the series touches on that, explaining what the Paris Agreement signatories will have to submit in the following 2 years such as the Biennial Transparency Report and updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
And to end off the year, we collaborated with Creation Care SG, a Christian community that aims to inspire and equip fellow believers and churches in Singapore to love and care for God's creation, on a Christmas post, explaining the importance of environmental care in Christianity and how certain Christmas traditions may be affected due to the climate crisis.
Global News
🌐COP28 concluded with the adoption of the world’s first Global Stocktake. In a nutshell, the text called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science”. However, the text was criticised by some, including the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), many of whom were not even in the room when the deal was concluded, for lacking in ambition. Language on the phaseout of fossil fuels was removed from the text, and it only focused on the transitioning away of fossil fuels in ‘energy systems’, instead of all systems (e.g. manufacturing or transport).
While the deal is still a watershed moment in that it is the first time all countries have agreed on the need to move away from fossil fuels, the devil will be in the details, as there remains a lot of ambiguity on the ambition and timelines of policies needed to transition away from fossil fuels, and whether this is enough. In short, the COP28 outcome should be seen as the beginning steps towards stronger climate action, and not the end.
For more in-depth analysis of COP28 outcomes, see Carbon Brief’s summary.
Local News
🇸🇬Singapore also announced various new initiatives at COP28. To summarise a few of them below:
Singapore will not claim from the Loss & Damage Fund, and will look to ‘galvanise financing’ to help countries at risk from the effects of the climate crisis access funds for solutions. (SGCR commends this decision; for more on our stance on this issue, see our post on Singapore and the L&D fund)
Singapore will also launch a new ‘blended finance initiative’ known as the Financing Asia’s Transition Partnerships (FAST-P). It will essentially help transition projects (projects that help carbon-intensive industries lower their emissions) and marginally bankable green projects raise funds from the public sector, in turn making it less risky for private sector funding. Up to S$6.6 billion is expected to be raised through FAST-P.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) launched the Singapore-Asia Taxonomy for Sustainable Finance, which defines the thresholds and criteria for banks and financial institutions when financing green business activities that contribute to climate mitigation across 8 sectors. The aim is to provide more clarity on what constitutes ‘sustainable’ or ‘transitional’ financing, and hopefully reduce the risk of greenwashing by companies.
MAS also launched a new Transition Credits Coalition (TRACTION) (the Singaporean urge to make everything an acronym continues) to study the challenges and develop the use of transition credits as viable market solutions to accelerate the early retirement of coal-fired power plants.
More Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) were signed with Costa Rica, Fiji, Rwanda, and Senegal to collaborate on carbon credits. An Implementation Agreement was signed with Papua New Guinea, making it the sole eligible country under the carbon credits eligibility list so far.
For a more comprehensive overview of what went down at COP28 and Singapore’s participation, check out Qiyun’s summary as well as SYCA’s roundup!
✅Lastly, in an interesting development, the Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore (Asas), Singapore’s advertising watchdog, found that a campaign by consumer electronics company PRISM+ claiming that its energy-efficient air-conditioners could “save Earth” was greenwashing, and breached its advertising standards. Asas said that any energy savings claims should be substantiated by tests conducted by independent parties on the company’s products compared to its competitors, and in conditions that are applicable to the local context. PRISM+ has since taken down the advertisement.
📺As usual, for our less reading-inclined Zoomers and Gen Alphas (we kid), here’s a helpful summary of the COP28 outcome by DW News:
🧑🏫On the sidelines of COP28, CNA also spoke to Assoc. Prof Winston Chow, who earlier this year became the first Singaporean to be elected co-chair of a working group in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
🤔Now that we have a global agreement to move away from fossil fuels, what does this mean for Singapore’s industrial sector, which contributes 44 percent of our emissions and is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels? In this CNA commentary, the author, a Senior Research Fellow at the Energy Studies Institute in NUS, analyses this issue and suggests focusing on decarbonising sectors such as information and communications technology (ICT) (e.g. power use in facilities such as in data centres), and maritime transport and aviation, while a more rigorous carbon accounting model can be developed to quantify indirect emissions (e.g. emissions of your goods shipped from overseas). However, as the text only specifies transitioning away from fossil fuels ‘in energy systems’, it remains to be seen whether steps will be taken on this front involving the industrial sector at large.