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Sand-filled barges crisscross the shipping lanes around Singapore, almost as ubiquitous as the trucks cruising America’s interstate highways.
One recent afternoon, aboard a small motor boat, I see a towering green wall rising from the shoreline and protecting a huge reservoir of sand.
As one of the most densely populated countries in the world, intent on building up, down and out, Singapore could not survive without millions of tons of granulated material.
The city-state is slowly coming back to life as the coronavirus lockdown eases. Yet the answers to existential questions about Singapore’s future lie not in its glass and steel office towers or orchid-adorned shopping malls or vibrant street vendor centers.
They are in the water around it.
There, you’ll see evidence of a country half the size of Maui and one of the richest in the world that is desperate to expand.
When you are an island nation and the seas are rising, the sand is something you will never find yourself without. Singapore has increased its land area by about a quarter since the 1960s.
The republic is often thought of as a single small island filled with state-of-the-art skyscrapers and highways that can take you from one extreme to the other in about half an hour. In fact, the country is made up of between 40 and 70 islands, although few residents can calculate this accurately. Land reclamation has merged some islands over the years for industrial use, while others appear to be little more than a cluster of rocks and shrubs. A handful are reserved for the military.
Some of Singapore’s most iconic landmarks have emerged in places that were once underwater: the Marina Bay Sands Hotel and Casino, Changi Airport and the Port of Singapore.
The address of the historic Raffles Hotel is not in vain One Beach Road; The shoreline, which at one point began at the end of its gravel drive, is now barely visible through tower blocks and luxury condos.
It has been an agonizing year for the construction industry in Singapore. Activity fell 44.7% in the third quarter from a year earlier, a slightly less dire result than the 59.9% drop in the previous three months.
While construction works are up and running again, it will be a long road. The sector has been particularly affected by coronavirus outbreaks in the bedrooms of foreign workers, who make up a large part of the workforce.
However, the need for sand will not go away, said Adam Switzer, associate president of the Asian School of the Environment at Nanyang Technological University. “Singapore, like many other parts of the world, will need to defend its coastline against future sea level rises,” Switzer said in an email. “That will almost certainly require obtaining sand.”
Climate change is truly a matter of life and death in Singapore. If global warming continues at the current rate, an area as large as 3,400 soccer fields in the city center could flood by 2100, as my colleague Andy Mukherjee has pointed out.
The leaders are well aware: “Everything else must bow to its knees to safeguard the existence of our island nation,” Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said last year.
Singapore’s appetite for sand has become controversial. Some neighbors who used to sell it have objected, citing concerns about environmental degradation.
Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam have stopped exporting. When Malaysia banned overseas sales of marine sand in 2019, cynics suggested there was more at stake: The country is trying to increase its own ports in and around the Johor Strait that separate it from Singapore. Like Indonesia, Malaysia has been built on the sea for real estate developments. Some strategies have been tried to reduce the country’s dependence on sand. At his National Day rally last year, Lee proposed the polder, a process common in the Netherlands that reclaims submerged land by building a seawall and pumping water. With competition intensifying for sand and other building materials in Asia, it also makes sense to think of substitutes, or whether there are geologically older inland sources that can be harnessed, Switzer said. One possibility could be the use of pellets made from recycled glass or plastic, he added.
There may even be a solution to Singapore’s crunching sand nestled in a different problem: what to do with all your junk.
Semakau Island is home to one of the largest garbage processing facilities in Singapore. The site is likely to reach capacity by the middle of the next decade, but officials are working on a Plan B that would convert the ash from incineration to landfills to spread Semakau and help create a kind of hybrid sand, according to the Straits Times in September could be used for concrete benches, walkways, and even a plaza.
The sea around Singapore defined it long before Stamford Raffles established a British port two centuries ago. In the words of its first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, the republic is a small place with no natural resources or a hinterland, which has made the port of Singapore central to its vision of prosperity. As our ship ducked and zigzagged between container ships and tankers, the water from their surf splashing my face, there seemed to be a nascent promise that commercial activity was coming to life.
But while much of Singapore’s fortune is tied to water, its journey from an impoverished point to an Asian financial and trading powerhouse has gone hand in hand with its need for space and sand. The country is surrounded by neighbors, sometimes cooperative and jealous, who have both.
Singapore’s reserves are as strategic as America’s oil reserves. Sand, or something like that, will be a hot commodity as long as there is a Singapore.
Daniel Moss is a Bloomberg opinion
columnist covering Asian economies.
The opinions expressed here are yours.
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