Letters | On World Water Day: what Singapore could teach Hong Kong about a secure future
- Visionary leaders would foresee worst-case scenarios and make strategic plans to deal with them should they eventuate
- But there seem to be no signs of our government preparing plans for worst-case scenarios regarding water resilience
The theme for World Water Day 2020 today, Water and Climate Change, highlights the close relationship between the two.
Worldwide, 785 million people are short of drinking water. The United Nations says global water use has been increasing at more than twice the rate of global population growth in the last century.
Visionary leaders would work to foresee worst-case scenarios and make strategic plans to deal with them should they eventuate. But there seem to be no signs of our government preparing plans for worst-case scenarios regarding water resilience, similar to those being deployed to combat the coronavirus epidemic.
At the beginning, the water was used mainly by the industrial sector. Today it accounts for 40 per cent of Singapore’s total consumption, including drinking. The Singapore government aims to increase the use of NEWater to 55 per cent by 2060 as a way to reduce reliance on imported water.
