Environmental Studies Commons^™

Navigating Sustainable Futures, Franziska Zimmermann

Asian Management Insights

A leadership imperative.

Geographies Of Storage, Sayd Randle

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Resource storage has long played a key role in the production of socio-ecological arrangements and economic relations. Even so, storage as a concept has remained somewhat marginal within geographical scholarship, often obscured by an analytical focus on the dynamics of movement. Reviewing recent works from geography, science and technology studies, and anthropology that center sites and practices of storage, this essay elaborates the diverse ways in which storage arrangements mediate resource circulation and the production of space. This literature demonstrates that thinking systematically with storage can illuminate a range of novel temporal, material, and value entanglements in-the-making, pointing to potentially …

When Planetary Cosmopolitanism Meets The Buddhist Ethic: Recycling, Karma And Popular Ecology In Singapore, Siew Ying Shee, Orlando Woods, Lily Kong

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

By thinking with and through Buddhist cosmology, this paper explores the emergence of an ethical sensibility—what we call planetary cosmopolitanism—that is based on not just a spatially expanded ethic of care to ecological worlds, but also a temporally extended sense of justice to the future Earth. This transtemporal sense of ethical becoming reflects how the possibility of future ‘rebirth’ and accountability for past actions can motivate new ecological consciousness in the present. We forge these ideas through an empirical focus on popular Buddhist ecological practices in Singapore, where green recovery visions have primarily been driven by a secular and technocratic …

Research@Smu: Sustainable Living, Singapore Management University

Research Collection Office of Research

Sustainable Living is one of the three key priorities of the SMU 2025 Strategy, and the University is committed to develop it into an area of cross-disciplinary strength. The articles in this booklet highlight impactful sustainability research accomplishments at SMU, which spans five broad pillars: Sustainable Business Operations; Sustainable Finance and Impact Assessment; Sustainable Ageing and Wellness; Sustainable Urban Infrastructure; and Sustainable Agro-business and Food Consumption.

Contents:

Sustainable Business Operations

• Managing the Load on Loading Bays
• Going the Last-mile
• Feeding a Growing World
• Pooling the Benefits of Sharing a Ride

Sustainable Finance and Impact Assessment

• When Going Green Becomes a …

Building Climate-Resilient Cities, Winston Chow

Perspectives@SMU

Besides the 3R’s of reduce-reuse-recycle, people should also consider ASI – avoid, shift, and improve

Downscaling Of Physical Risks For Climate Scenario Design, Enrico Biffis, Shuai Wang

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Southeast Asia is arguably one of the areas most vulnerable to natural disasters due to its dense population, coastal urbanization, and rainfall variability driven by the local monsoon systems. In this report, we focus on the impact of global warming in the region along four climate dimensions: temperature, precipitation, wind speed and coastal surge. The latter represents the surge of water from the ocean in excess of astronomical tides. Our objective is to downscale the outputs of global climate models to temporal and spatial resolutions of interest to market participants wishing to quantify climate risk vulnerability via climate stress testing …

Tackling Regional Climate Change And Food Security Issues: An Introduction, Md. Saidul Islam, Edson Kieu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Regional organizations are central to effectively addressing the current and future impacts of climate change and food security issues. Climate change and food security issues can only be dealt with through extensive policies that adopt a multi-sector, multi-stakeholder approach. An examination of three regional organizations (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Pacific Islands Forum, and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) can provide new insights into current climate change mitigation policies that will ensure food security for future generations. This opening chapter thus begins with the premise that regional organizations are optimally positioned to address climate change and …

Is Uber Bad For The Environment?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Research finds Uber’s carbon footprint depended on the characteristics of individual cities

Relationship Between Humidity And Physiology In Warm And Humid Conditions – A Literature Review, Yuliya Dzyuban

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Change in precipitation patterns caused by global warming will likely increase humidity in some areas of the world. Moreover, populations in tropical climates with already high humidity levels can experience an added stress on their health and thermal comfort due to an amplifying effect of heat and moisture. Humidity is a generic term commonly used to describe moisture in the air. However, there are numerous variables that describe different properties of humid air that can be used in scientific studies. While relative humidity remains the most used, it has several shortcomings associated with its high correlation with air temperature. Thus, …

Tackling Regional Climate Change Impacts And Food Security Issues: A Critical Analysis Across Asean, Pif, And Saarc, Md. Saidul Islam, Edson Kieu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Climate change and food security issues are multi-faceted and transcend across national boundaries. Therefore, this paper begins with the premise that regional organizations are optimally positioned to address climate change and food security issues while actively engaging global partners to slow down or reverse current trajectories. However, the potential of regional organizations to play a central role in mitigating these vital concerns has not been realized. In this paper, we focus on three regional organizations—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and set out to investigate …

The Spirulina Strategy, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

This is an adapted version of the SMU Case, “Navigating an Eternal Ocean: EnerGaia’s Emergent Strategy in the Market for Spirulina" written by Research Fellow Ryan Merrill and Assistant Professor Simon Schillebeeckx. To see the full case, please click on the following link: https://cmp.smu.edu.sg/case/3986

EnerGaia began life trying to address nutrition issues in the developing world. The prospect of profit is testing its founder to balance both or choose one over the other

Virtual Trees In The Real World, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Ant Forest made reforestation fun in China. Can the carbon reduction effort go global? How should it?

Unearthing The X-Streams: Visualizing Water Contamination, Akangsha Bandalkul, Angad Srivastava, Kishan Bharadwaj Shridhar, Jason Guan Jie Ong, Yanrong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The datasets released for VAST 2018 Mini Challenge 2 pertain to sensor readings capturing chemical concentrations and physical properties from water bodies in the Boonsong Lekagul wildlife preserve. This challenge is in continuation to the VAST 2017 Challenge, where the company Kasios was identified as the culprit in dumping the chemical - Methylosmoline. In the absence of actual chemical measurements in the soil, challenge participants need to visualize chemical contamination based on the proximal water bodies to identify trends of interest. A horizon plot developed helps to narrow down the complete list of 106 chemicals provided to only 7, …

Disasters Fast And Slow: The Temporality Of Hazards In Environmental History, Fiona Williamson, Chris Courtney

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Popular representations of disasters tend to focus upon dramatic moments of chaos. They envision panicked communities desperately scrambling for safety as earthquakes reduce cities to rubble or lava turns villages to ashes. Yet disasters actually unfold on numerous temporal scales. Media reports tend to reduce disasters to discrete events, initiated on the shallow causal timescale of a meteorological fluctuation or seismic disruption. Social scientists, by contrast, have often sought to emphasise the processual nature of disasters—embedding causality in the deeper timescale of a community, in which risk and vulnerability build over months or years.2 Environmental historians elongate causality even further, …

Malaya's Greatest Menace? Slow-Onset Disaster And The Muddy Politics Of British Malaya, C. 1900–50, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In 1948, a chilling statement from British Malaya’s Director of Agriculture, F. Burnett, made headline news. According to Burnett, unchecked soil erosion across hillside Malaya would soon render the country’s precious agricultural land infertile. Erosion had worsened considerably after the 1880s due to widespread, indiscriminate agricultural and industrial clearing. By the 1920s, it had become a sizeable socioeconomic and environmental issue, thought also to contribute to the scale and intensity of flooding and the likelihood of dangerous landslips. The British Government raised a series of empire-wide inquiries across the first half of the twentieth century, tied to an emerging global …

Global Garbage Cans: Towards Better Household Hazardous Waste Management In Asia's Developing Countries, Kustini Lim-Wavde, Robert J. Kauffman

Asian Management Insights

Towards better household hazardous waste management in developing countries in Asia.

The Business Of Business…Is Creating Shared Value, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Corporations, governments and NGOs need to work together for mankind to exist sustainably, says the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands

The Need For Sustainable Finance, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Bringing about sustainable or ‘green’ finance requires a convergence of policy and profitability – and it’s not just the developed countries that are leading the way

Hospital To Home: Interoperability In The Health Ecosystem, Francis Puno

Asian Management Insights

Mobile health solutions have created a revolution in the global healthcare ecosystem.

Numerical Analysis Of Non-Constant Pure Rate Of Time Preference: A Model Of Climate Policy, Tomoki Fujii, Larry Karp

Research Collection School Of Economics

When current decisions affect welfare in the far-distant future, as with climate change, the use of a declining pure rate of time preference (PRTP) provides potentially important modeling flexibility. The difficulty of analyzing models with non-constant PRTP limits their application. We describe and provide software (available online) to implement an algorithm to numerically obtain a Markov perfect equilibrium for an optimal control problem with non-constant PRTP. We apply this software to a simplified version of the numerical climate change model used in the Stern Review. For our calibration, the policy recommendations are less sensitive to the PRTP than widely believed. …