Singapore Business Federation Post-COP30 Dialogue - Ms Grace Fu

Good afternoon, everyone. COP30 was held under very challenging circumstances. Logistically, it was a tough place to hold a major global meeting with so many people coming from all parts of the world. But more importantly, it was under tremendous attention about whether multilateralism is able to still convene and get everyone together for global climate action.

Even though there was one absentee, the rest of us were very much engaged and looking at how to move forward in global climate action. But to be honest, no one in the room has the appetite to say, “Can we have more ambitious targets?” It was just not that atmosphere. Because we have, over the last few COP really ratchet up the ambition. For whoever remains in the room, there has been political changes in their own domestic system. After the Ukraine war, populations are signalling that there's only this much of my standard of living that I'm prepared to sacrifice for a greener future.

Even without more ambitious targets, there's still a lot for us to do just to reach the NDCs and national targets that we have delivered or submitted, because the world needs a lot more climate action from where we are today to the net zero world that we foresee or envisage in the coming decades.

With Singapore’s participation particularly in carbon credits and finance, we make a real difference. It is really this convening role that Singapore has in carbon credits as well as finance, that I think we are making our presence. With our hub status in finance, knowledge and standards setting, Singapore has a unique role to play in global climate action.

What this COP also tells us is that we need to make movement on another area that is perhaps not as much talked about, which is adaptation. Finally, we reached an agreement on 59 indicators of the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) that has been agreed upon and adopted at COP. This is very important, because increasingly we find climate risk finding its way into business decisions, such as through investments and loans.

If you are in business, and you have to think about investing for the long run, whether it's setting up a plant in Thailand, or whether it's going to be a hotel in Switzerland, increasingly, climate risk is being factored, whether you like it or not. Whether you have it as an explicit factor, it’s coming into your decision through finance, through loans, through insurance. Now if you are in a bank, if you are a carbon credits project developer, or if you are in insurance, you would really want to know what the country’s adaptation plan is.

Although adaptation has moved later than mitigation, it cannot be dealt with in isolation. If you have a plan to tap your river system for hydroelectricity, you have to think about what your strategy is if there’s a drought. You need to have some way to deal with adaptation given different climatic risks and conditions. So, mitigation and adaptation cannot be separated, it has to be considered as a whole. This is really a much-awaited half to the whole climate action plan.

This is also the reason why we have decided to dedicate 2026 as the Year of Climate Adaptation because we know that the global adaptation framework has been laid out. The Singapore government would like to galvanise all sectors, all businesses, all committee groups to also think about adaptation.

Of course, this is before five weeks ago, where something important happened. This important incident actually draw attention to this very fundamental question we should ask all businesses – Do you have Business Continuity Plans (BCP) for this geopolitical risk? In this case, the commodity is few, but it could have been many other factors that has an impact on your business, climatic risk can affect you.

This is really a question that we want to ask ourselves and also ask of you, because the government can only do this much. We can make sure that there's some basic climatic infrastructure that we will put in place, from now to many decades to come. But even that, we can't have BCP done for you, and you have to evaluate this for yourselves. Ask the question, what is the government doing and what is the government not doing? Where are the gaps for my businesses? Where else are you operating beside Singapore? Are the governments outside Singapore doing the same? What is their National Adaptation Plan, and how does that give me protection? What do they do and not do? So that I, as a company operating in that system, will have a ready BCP.

For example, outdoor work, if we're going to have many more hot days that's going to reduce the outdoor productivity of outdoor workers, how are you going to protect your outdoor workers, and what is that impact on your project delivery?

For flood and coastal protection, we have just passed an act in the parliament that requires all coastal landowners to institute or to put in place coastal protection features. Why we do that is because you are in a better place to know what protection measures are required. If you are operating a hotel or resort, versus a ship repair operator, the coastal protection measures will be very different.

By having this conversation today, we are really bringing the attention of adaptation from a global basis down to the national basis. We are going to run through all the 59 indicators and look at those that are relevant to Singapore. We are going to have that discussion even within the Government, between different ministries, different agencies, then we are going to have conversations with businesses. Different sectors will have different risks. Climate risks will impact you in different ways, and you may need to organise yourselves by sector, by industry. You have to work upstream and downstream, such as with your customers, suppliers, and then have a discussion as to where are the gaps and how can we plot the gaps? We need to get other sectors involved, such as insurance, to help us understand the business risk better. We need to talk to regulators about how we're going to evaluate climatic risk in investments and lending decisions.

Although we say that this is for the long run, you can see that extreme weather events are already happening and they are happening in greater frequency. What we really want from all of you is attention to this matter, to start thinking from within. What does climate change mean to me, given the fact that the global action to mitigate is not moving as quickly as we like. The risk of climate warming has increased the range of possible implications. While we can never have certainty as to how that's going to impact us and when it's going to impact us, but we know that directionally, it’s coming faster and with a wider variation. This means that you probably have more drier days, and more intense rains on other days.

Although it is something that you need to think about in the long run, but what we want to start is the thought process and planning process, because certain adaptation strategy requires many years to implement. Coastal protection is one of those. Some of them may require BCP to be drawn up sooner than we expect, and we call on companies to pay attention to this very important issue. We don't want to be the frogs in boiling water. We want to be able to jump out when we sense the water is getting hotter, so that we will not be boiled over.

Businesses need to know what the Government is doing in order to have a better BCP, and businesses need industry information as well. Sometimes this information will have to come from the government because we have a more global or macro view. This is why I am announcing the formation of the Council for a Competitive Climate Transition (C3T). This is a structured Council that Mr Ravi Menon, Singapore’s Ambassador for Climate Action, and Mr Kok Ping Soon, Chief Executive Officer of SBF will be chairing, representing both public and private sector.

C3T is a structured place where we could share information and strategies both ways, where we can co-create some of the policies so as to address gaps. Ultimately, through this council, we want to have a more effective implementation of our national plans and a more structured way of executing our mitigation and adaptation plan. So that as a whole, Singapore can continue to be a very resilient place, where things work, to do business, even given extreme weather events. If we are impacted, things will get back to normalcy as quickly as we can. That is the resiliency that we're looking for, and it will have to come from government, private and the people sectors. Thank you.