What does it mean to value water in Singapore?

WATER. DIGITAL. RESILIENCE

What does it mean to value water in Singapore?

Co-authored with Lau Yingshan Phd candidate at NUS Department of Geography

7 FEB 2022

5 MINS READ

ISMAIL WEILIANG

The Climatebender

YING SHAN

Co-author

Phd candidate at NUS Department of Geography

Views are entirely ours

and not connected to any company

Water is essential

It’s amazing to see how babies are so fascinated by water. In a bathtub, most newborns feel instantly at home, because a watery environment has been their home for the past nine months. Older babies can spend minutes on end in water, protesting loudly when they are taken out. Perhaps our innate affinity to water stems from the fact that the human body is 70% water. Water is essential to all life on Earth, and it is what makes our planet our home.

Photo taken in 2017: Ismail Weiliang (Planning & Research Intern) with Yingshan Lau (Senior Manager at PUB's sustainability department)

Valuing Water

From 2005, the mission of PUB, Singapore’s national water agency, was ‘Water for all: Conserve, value, enjoy’. “Conserve” is to remind Singapore residents about the scarcity of water, harking back to the times when water rationing was necessary. Indeed, Singapore is ranked as one of the most water-scarce countries in the world (World Resource Institute, 2015). “Enjoy” is through the unleashing of the recreational potential of water. Since 2006, the Singapore government opened up reservoir spaces for on-water activities and has been bringing people closer to water bodies through the Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters (ABC Waters) Programme. “Value” is perhaps the most ambiguous – some say that it is to develop a relationship with water, and cited how people in other countries celebrated when the rainy season arrived. But having grown up in Singapore where there are no distinct dry or rainy seasons, what exactly does this feel like?

Reverence for Water

In 2019, Ying shan’s PhD fieldwork brought her to northern Lao PDR. She spent some time with an upland village that mainly engaged in semi-subsistence, rainfed agriculture. Being rainfed means that there is a lack of irrigation infrastructure, and that farmers rely on the rains to water their vast fields.

2019 was an exceptionally dry year, with the onset of the rainy season delayed by about 2-3 months. When the first heavy rain fell in the village in July, she thought it was cause for joy, but one farmer told her that it was still too little rain. Another family’s rice harvest was suboptimal, because there was insufficient rain over the rainy season to wet their paddy fields. What had looked like a promising harvest in September, when she joined the family’s backbreaking work of weeding, failed to thrive by harvest time in December. The cool dry season – during which traditional farmers harvest their rice crops – was followed by what seemed like an unbearably hot dry season, with daytime temperatures almost reaching 40 degrees Celsius on some days. She was definitely looking forward to the first rains of Pii Mai (the Lao New Year): having learnt from the village how important water was to their survival – not just for drinking, but for their food production system (embedded water) – Ying Shan was starting to understand the joys of welcoming the first rains.

During the first Covid-19 lockdown in Laos, Yingshan decided to celebrate the arrival of the rainy season by making a makeshift rain gauge This was the amount of rain collected on the night of 5th April 2020.

People wade through the flood zone on Tuesday after the collapse of a hydropower dam in Laos, 2018. (SCMP, 2018)

Besides the lack of water, the upland village also experienced the effects of having too much water. Excess rainfall in the previous year had caused localised flooding, over saturating the soils and killing off some teak trees, which are the farmers' long-term economic investments. In end-2019, the Nam Ou dam nearest to Luang Prabang was completed, sparking some quiet but worried discussion amongst her Lao friends about the engineering stability of the dam (in 2018, a dam in southern Laos had failed, killing at least 71 people and destroying thousands of homes immediately downstream (Sohsai, 2021)). One of her friends shared that she was worried that Luang Prabang City would come under water should this new dam fail.

“Value” also refers to a fear of water’s destructive impacts – too much, too fast, too strong. The schizophrenic combination of cherishing and fear can be summed up as reverence.

Reverence of Water in the Future

As one of the most water stressed countries in the world and the threats and impact of climate change becoming increasingly pronounced, this reverence for water may become a reality for Singaporeans. Singapore has stepped up efforts to address the critical challenge of climate change adaptation and mitigation. This is seen in PUB’s revised mission in 2021: Supply Good Water. Reclaim Used Water. Tame Storm Water. Resist Rising Seas. Being the pragmatic Singaporeans we are, we value water by focusing on being water resilient. This will keep Singapore focused on delivering a resilient city with sustainable water supply and protected from floods in the uncertain future.

Authors:

Lau Yingshan is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography in the National University of Singapore. She holds a MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies (Sustainability) from the Australian National University. She is passionate about issues of sustainable rural development, particularly the nexus between forestry, agriculture and water. Her PhD fieldwork was in the Lao PDR and she employed the participatory action research approach to understand the rural communities’ watershed-related traditional and local knowledge.

Ismail Weiliang is a climate resilience consultant with over half a decade of experience and specialises in flood risk advisory for Asia. His work involves advising governments and development banks on strategies to transform climate risks into resilience. He also founded “The Climatebender” a non-profit organisation that provides humanitarian relief to communities vulnerable to the climate crisis.

References

Sohsai, P. (2021) Three Years Later the Lao Dam Disaster is still a warning on How Unsustainable and Unjust Dams Are. Available at: https://www.internationalrivers.org/news/three-years-later-the-lao-dam-disaster-is-still-a-warning-on-how-unsustainable-and-unjust-dams-are/ (Accessed: 15 January 2022)
South China Morning Post (2018) Laos dam damage was discovered 24 hours before disastrous collapse, says South Korean builder. Available at: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/2156721/laos-dam-damage-was-discovered-24-hours-disastrous (Accessed: 4 February 2022)
World Resources Institute, 2015. Available at: https://www.wri.org/insights/ranking-worlds-most-water-stressed-countries-2040 (Accessed: 14 December 2021)