Transcript of Minister for Foreign Affairs Vivian Balakrishnan's remarks at the Commonwealth Ministerial Meeting on Small States in Apia, Samoa, 23 October 2024

Madam Chair, I come from Singapore, a tiny island state. Samoa is four times larger than Singapore, and Eswatini is about 20 times larger than Singapore.

I am making these points because Singapore is a tiny, low lying island state, and we make common cause with all small island developing states in the Commonwealth and indeed, in the world.

I want to focus my comments specifically on climate change and resilience. The impact of sea level rise, rising temperatures, droughts, floods, hurricanes, ocean pollution and acidification are not theoretical threats for all of us. I wanted to take this opportunity to share a couple of things which Singapore is doing which may provide some avenues for cooperation with all of you in this group. To understand the impact of climate change, specifically on a small island and indeed in Southeast Asia, we've undertaken three National Climate Change studies. Our latest National Climate Change study provided the world's highest resolution climate projections for Singapore and Southeast Asia until the end of the century. It advances a scientific understanding of our tropical climate and provides what we believe is the common scientific basis to prepare for a climate-resilient future. Singapore will be very happy to share our data, our methodologies and the underlying technologies to conduct such studies in your respective parts of the world. We will share our data through the ASEAN specialised meteorological centre to help.

The second point is, we believe that we do need to mobilise capital from the private sector because to make an effective green transition requires huge amounts of finance. We believe that at least USD$1.1 trillion will be needed annually to meet climate mitigation and adaptation needs across Asia alone. If you add Africa, the Caribbean, and South America, that number is even larger.

But we all know that actual investment falls far short, probably in the order of at least USD$800 billion, and that's why Singapore has launched a blended finance platform called Financing Asia's Transition Partnership, or FAST-P for short, with a target fund size of USD$5 billion for a start. This fund will target three key areas most pertinent to us: energy transition, decarbonisation and industrial transformation.

These will include themes such as phasing out coal, promoting renewable energy projects, decarbonisation projects such as electric vehicles and hard-to-abate sectors like aviation, shipping, steel and cement, as well as emerging low-carbon fuels such as hydrogen and ammonia. We will provide more details of this at the upcoming COP29.

Third, we are also happy to share our experience in climate action by supporting capacity building efforts. Under the Singapore Cooperation Programme, we have sustainability action package that will include themes such as climate change and resilience building, and we want to use this programme to invite leaders of your respective countries to spend time with us. We will run an open-book exercise, and hope that this will provide an exchange of ideas and best practices, and to disseminate and optimise our response going forward. 

So let me just end again by making common cause that you have a vulnerable, small, tiny state in a heart of Southeast Asia called Singapore and we look forward to doing more with all of you.

Thank you for inviting me.

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