Happy National Day Singapore 🇸🇬

As a Singapore-phile, having lived in the global city for a better part of decade in various parts working, researching and studying on tax payer money (NRF and SSHRC Scholarships) at NUS and NTU, I am grateful and the Tiny Red Dot is home, truly with wonderful local family and friends. A city with its eye on the future and great leadership to implement the visionary policies.

Always happy to give back where I have learned so much and have precious memories. One does not need to have PR to feel one is back home when one lands at T3 Changi Airport or have the CKT at Zion Road Food Centre.

I was recently there and the photo is from Farrer Park MRT and was fortunate to view the NDP rehearsals at Marina Bay Sands on a Saturday evening.

I look forward to writing a PhD on a Singapore based topic hopefully soon, and will visit again to learn from the best thinkers in the region.

Majulah Singapura !

The Clementi Boy

There are several terms in the sustainability space, which are utilized interchangeably- ESG, Impact, Sustainability, Climate Adaptation etc. in a commonplace quotidian manner. These terms have a studied history and are rooted in a legacy of justice and thought. The big picture is responsible capitalism, which has the climate emergency at the heart of the change in thinking. Impact is about additionality, which is beyond CSR and compliance. Sustainability has different valency across scales and is more of an omnibus term. ESG is a datafication play of the sustainability umbrella. We need to think with resilience and crisis, and the climate emergency is an all-encompassing lens, but not the only one, we have forgotten the pandemic too soon in a reactive amnesia to redeem ourselves of pain. Digital is a slow, sleeping crisis and of opportunity. A cultural shift as the climate emergency.

There is so much unthought while we are drowning in jargon.

The Future of Work is a Climate Change Issue, as the weather changes our capacity to work also evolves, especially for employers in the physical workspace such as construction, delivery work or mining. Time to think through green in a complexity thinking approach. Thinking about the climate transition in a single-issue fashion is deleterious as mere reports will not roll back the ‘global boiling’ moment There needs to be genuine skills in cross disciplinary manner as climate modelers need to be conversant in STS and econometrics. Or doctors apt in the language of heat induced stress. Too many of our academic programs in science and engineering are simply inept as a superior design is not as effective with the lack of stakeholder engagement skills. In the era of climate litigation, we need biologists who have a law degree or finance major with decent skills in conservation science for Nature based Climate Solutions.

We need a new script for climate education, for the global boiling era.

A decade in Clementi seems just like yesterday as today I was back to my neighbourhood after a year, and the guys at the Prata shop and the Uncle at the Kopitiam recognised me with nods and the where have you been question.

Home is a familiar space, even when it is lost. I often dream about the space. I am used to losing spaces of care, with Muscat being the first at the age of 30.

The Clementi Boy will be back again for Kopi.

Sitting in between the narrow shelf ways of Kino at Takashimaya in Singapore, has been a personal favourite over the years, and I am back here after almost a decade. It is a near spiritual experience to breathe in the breathe of physical books in the era of Amazon, where people hardly read.

The Singapore section is a delight as a window into work on the global city.

As one of the few writers who have written on Singapore in the Indian Media, the coverage of the global city among South Asian Academia is rather limited. There are plenty of thesis on India written at NUS/NTU each year, however vice versa cannot be said.

Tanglin Cookhouse.

Sunday Brunch #3 and the last one on this trip to Singapore.

The English Breakfast was great, where colonial fare is the theme.

The impact assessment practitioner has been at the forefront of environmental and social safeguarding while the infrastructural needs for a changing world for a long time. The ESHIA is the foundation of ESG with its strengths in reporting, impact measurement and replicable character and scenario planning with all the technical modeling which TCFD needs is all in the traditional paradigm of impact assessment.

The language of integrated risk is similar as in ESG and ESHIA, both have moving parts as human rights, climate and community are common to both. ESG is an everyday operations matter while ESHIA and EMP and an ESAP are a pre construction and construction phase affair and usually is asset oriented.

The H in the ESHIA is now Human Rights with Health being an embedded element. After all, Environmental and Social Planning is not new with an rich intellectual genealogy since the 1970s.

ESHIA is a key intellectual mechanism for the responsible transition, as stakeholder social licence to operate has been a key part of the process, albeit imperfections being carried into the future.