Singapore ranked 8th for eco-friendly performance

By Paula Mccoy

SINGAPORE has been ranked eighth among 36 countries by a new report which judges countries according to their environmental performance.

Compiled by an international team of experts, the GIN-DEX survey measures industrial efficiency by looking at World Bank and International Energy Agency data on carbon emissions, water pollution, commercial energy use and industrial output.

It will be presented today at a conference in Bangkok organised by the Asian Centre of the Greening of Industry Network, an international partnership, research and policy institute which developed the survey index.

Singapore was narrowly beaten by Argentina, Britain, Germany, France and Italy. Japan topped the list and Norway came second.

'Singapore is an advanced country. The type of technology industries use tends to be newer, more eco-friendly and produces much less waste than the older technology used in some other countries,' said the report.

The taskforce also said it is discussing with the Ministry of the Environment the possibility of using Singapore as a model to show how the environment has to be dealt with.

But the GIN-DEX placing comes on the heels of another report in Newsweek magazine and due to be officially released next week which ranks Singapore as one of the 10 worst countries, out of more than 50, for its environmental record.

In this report, by a Global Leaders for Tomorrow taskforce which will be presented to the World Economic Forum, Singapore has been put on a par with Vietnam, Bangladesh and Uganda.

The report uses broader criteria to measure how countries perform environmentally. It takes into account more than 60 factors under five categories

These include threats to biodiversity and the impact of population growth, human vulnerability to environmental impact, evaluating how well societies respond to eco-challenges and whether there is an activist green community in the country, and global stewardship, in terms of how well countries address ozone depletion and other global problems.

It said that Singapore's low ranking was due to its unique geography as a city-state.

As a small country with quite a large population, it inevitably lives closer to critical thresholds, such as the availability of water and space for waste disposal than other countries, it said.