【10】Green infrastructure in Singapore

Singapore launched a bold campaign in the early 2000's to become the world's foremost knowledge and practicing city center for green infrastructure, smart city water management technologies and wastewater reuse.

Singapore's Utilities Board markets a bottled "New Water" product that comes from triple membrane filtrated sewage treatment plants.

The crowning glory of Singapore's water savvy is the engineered surface of its city, much of it designed or retrofitted in green infrastructure.

Two thirds of the city – rooftops, parks, medians, sidewalks, roadways – capture rainwater and convey it or pump it via microprocessor-controlled channels or tunnels to 18 reservoirs.

Singapore not only demonstrates for the world the design and engineering potential of urban water reclamation through green infrastructure, but it shows how doing so can create an international center of excellence that can result in substantial economic returns in water-sensitized forms of urban planning, architecture, engineering, information technology and green infrastructure innovation 

【9】Ecosystem regulating services

These are the benefits obtained from the regulation of ecosystem processes. They are closely linked to many fundamental biogeochemical processes, which are the biological and chemical processes that cycle and transform carbon, nutrients, water, and other materials in the environment. Regulating services include:

• Air quality maintenance. Ecosystems both contribute chemicals to and extract chemicals from the atmosphere, influencing many aspects of air quality.

• Climate regulation. Ecosystems influence climate both locally and globally. For example, at a local scale, changes in land cover can affect both temperature and precipitation. At the global scale, ecosystems play an important role in climate by either sequestering or emitting greenhouse gases.

• Water regulation. The timing and magnitude of runoff, flooding, and aquifer recharge can be strongly influenced by changes in land cover, including, in particular, alterations that change the water storage potential of the system, such as the conversion of wetlands or the replacement of forests with croplands or croplands with urban areas.

• Erosion control. Vegetative cover plays an important role in soil retention and the prevention of landslides.

• Water purification and waste treatment. Ecosystems can be a source of impurities in fresh water but also can help to filter out and decompose organic wastes introduced into inland waters and coastal and marine ecosystems.

• Regulation of human diseases. Changes in ecosystems can directly change the abundance of human pathogens, such as cholera, and can alter the abundance of disease vectors, such as mosquitoes.

• Biological control. Ecosystem changes affect the prevalence of crop and livestock pests and diseases.

• Storm protection. The presence of coastal ecosystems such as mangroves and coral reefs can dramatically reduce the damage caused by hurricanes or large waves.

【8】Cool the city without using more energy

It is possible to control the thermal comfort of smaller spaces, without using more energy. This is not just about reducing the absolute temperature, it’s also about making people feel comfortable.

The experience of temperature is controlled by both personal and environmental factors. Combinations of air temperature, wind, humidity and radiated heat will change the feeling, or apparent temperature, of the weather.

We can create spaces with optimum comfort levels through a combination of shading, reduced heat build up in materials, humidity and wind management. Rather than trying to change the temperature of the whole city, we can provide heat refuges at street level to make the city more functional on hot days.

We know that a comprehensive toolkit is needed to understand how we can cool the city in different places. Trees and greening are important but aren’t practical everywhere, and certainly not when they are used in isolation.Designs that also include redirecting wind, controlling humidity and water and that consider thermal qualities of materials are necessary. 

【7】The impact of climate change on water system

• The cryosphere—the frozen water on Earth—is melting. A warmer atmosphere causes the planet's snow pack, glaciers and sea and freshwater ice to melt at an accelerated pace. Melting glaciers and polar ice sheets contribute to sea level rise. As the ice melts, it also exposes more dark ocean waters, which absorbs more sunlight than ice, and thus heats the ocean more, triggering a cycle of melting and heating.

• Weather of all kinds is getting more extreme: The increased evaporation of water is like fuel for storms, exacerbating extreme weather events, such as hurricanes. Rising sea levels make coastal flooding events worse. In more naturally arid areas, droughts and wildfires intensify.

• The oceans are getting hotter, expanding, and becoming more acidic: The oceans are getting hotter, because they soak up 90% of the extra heat in the atmosphere. This causes the oceans to expand, and this also contributes to higher sea levels. Meanwhile, the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the ocean triggers a chemistry change that makes the water more acidic. The ocean is almost 40% more acidic than it used to be.