Singapore is looking for expert help to adapt to possible sea-level rise.
At the end of last month, the Building and Construction Authority (BCA), which is in charge of protecting the island nation’s coasts, called a tender for a coastal adaptation study - the most extensive one done here yet - to come up with a framework to keep low-lying areas safe.
It also wants a list of adaptation options, new design-and-maintenance guidelines, an instrumentation and monitoring programme, and suggestions for a coastal flood insurance system.
And it wants contractors - who must have technical and engineering know-how - to work with research institutions that have at least a decade of experience and research data in Singapore coastal and biodiversity work.
According to United Nations climate scientists’ last comprehensive report, global sea levels were projected to rise by between 0.18m and 0.59m this century.
The same could be true for Singapore, and mean sea levels in the Straits of Singapore have increased by about 3mm per year over the past 15 years.
Since 1991, all new reclamation projects have been built to 1.25m or more above the highest recorded tide level; in 2011, this was raised to 2.25m or more for new projects.
In addition, the BCA is reinforcing existing hard walls and stone embankments to protect Singapore’s coast from erosion.
A BCA spokesman said: “For the long term, we need to understand better how our coastal lands can be further protected. Therefore, we are conducting specialist studies, such as the Risk Map Study and Coastal Adaptation Study, to look into this.
“This is part of the larger inter-governmental effort to advance our understanding of climate change risks, and develop adaptive measures to address these risks.”
Professional engineer Chong Kee Sen, who is vice-president of the Institution of Engineers, Singapore (IES), said the study was significant and the first done for Singapore on this scale.
But he declined to identify possible coastal-adaptation options, saying it was premature for IES to comment.
In 2005, Yale University economist Robert Mendelsohn and student Wei-Shiuen Ng concluded in a paper that the cost of building, adding to and maintaining sea walls - to protect Singapore’s coasts from various degrees of rising sea levels - would range from US$300,000 to US$5.7 million by 2050, to US$900,000 to US$16.8 million by 2100.
