Since 1960, Singapore has reclaimed around 150 square kilometres of land from the sea. In part, this is to meet demand for homes: around 80% of Singaporeans live in government-provided housing, nicknamed HDBs, after the Housing and Development Board, and many of those are in high-density skyscrapers. Singapore is the third most densely populated territory in the world, after Macau and the city-state of Monaco. Alongside this, the country’s economic success is buttressed by being the world’s busiest port outside China, hosting more than 3.11 billion tonnes in traffic in 2024.

This urban development and economic success has come at a cost for the natural environment: where once there was jungle, there is now city. Singapore has lost almost all of its primary rainforest, except for a small tract of land in the Central Catchment Nature Reserve, which sits in the middle of the island and is part of one of the two main water catchment areas. Although some of the country’s remaining non-primary rainforests, including in the Central Catchment, are protected from development, their long-term fate is a concern for environmentalists…

In a bid to achieve its sustainability goals, the government has pledged to plant one million trees by 2030 and transplant 100,000 corals into its marine waters, which NParks said in 2024 would take at least 10 years to complete. Neither project is without controversy. “Nobody is tracking how many trees we are cutting down while we are planting a million trees,”…“How about those century-old trees that are being cut down for development?”… Academics and civil-society groups say that they cannot access the same data that are available to government agencies…

Excerpts from Jack Leeming, Singapore’s fight to save its green spaces from development, Nature, May 28, 2025