Take a moment to imagine this.
Every morning, you stare out the bus window, seeing that one old patch of forest, day after day. It becomes part of the scenery to you, and you never take much notice of it. Then, one fine day, you realise that barricades have sprung up around it.
“What’s going on?”, you think to yourself. And before you know it, the forest is gone. You are shocked – but only for a moment. In a few months, you see that construction has begun for a new HDB estate, or a cluster of new condominiums, or a new school. “Oh,” you sigh, “no wonder…”
Sounds familiar, right? Growing up in Singapore, we are no strangers to land clearances and construction works happening around us all the time. Often, we just shrug it off as something that needs to be done to keep our country going, but we don’t fully understand how these landscape changes are actually impacting our environment.
In the fields of Geography or Environmental Science, these changes are known as Land-use/Land-cover Change, or LULCC for short. It’s not the most commonly used term out there, but I think it provides us with a great framework to delve deeper into this issue.
What is LULCC?
LULCC refers to the changes that humans make to the natural land environment1. These include the clearance of natural habitats like forests, mangroves and swamps, for the development of human infrastructure such as buildings, roads and farms.
Wait, isn’t that deforestation? Well, deforestation is only one aspect of LULCC. Deforestation is the act of forests being cleared, while LULCC also considers how the cleared land is going to be used in the future! We’ll come back to this later.
The truth is that Singapore has been undergoing extensive LULCC ever since Sir Stamford Raffles stepped ashore in 1819. Between 1819 and 1900, 90% of Singapore’s forests were cut down and replaced mostly by plantations2, while mangrove cover of our mainland, by area, has decreased from 13% then to less than 1% today3.
Why does it happen?
The short answer to that is, we humans need space! Not just to build houses to live in, but also for farms, factories, roads, schools, hospitals, parks, and all other infrastructure that sustain our way of life. And since LULCC is human-driven, it is especially serious today because we humans are not just increasing in numbers4, but our appetites are also growing in terms of the amount of resources – and hence space — that each of us consumes5. This is happening not just in Singapore, but all over the world!
LULCC is the worst…
I’m sure we can all agree that deforestation is a bad thing, at least for our environment. Deforestation not only harms our local biodiversity by destroying their habitats but can also significantly affect our local climate!
When we cut down forests for human redevelopment, forest-dwelling animals have their habitats destroyed or fragmented6, which also increases the chance of human-wildlife conflicts7 like the one below.
Forests also cool the surrounding air by evapotranspiration8, so LULCC leads to the warming of local temperatures by reducing evapotranspiration while also exacerbating the urban heat island effect.
… or is it?
You know, as nature-lovers we often get sad, angry and bitter when we see our forests getting cleared one after another. I’m one of them myself, but I think it is also important that we take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
Earlier on, I mentioned that LULCC also considers how the deforested land is being developed, that is what is being built on it. Now what does it mean for our environment if our forests are cleared but in their place, new parks and gardens are built? We shouldn’t forget that Singapore is also known as the “Garden City”9, or more recently, the “City in Nature”10.
In Singapore, as much as our natural vegetation is being cleared, huge efforts are also being taken to green our city in the form of parks and green landscaping. Across our country, we have over 350 parks11 and even our concrete waterways are being “greened” through the ABC Waters Programme. This has resulted in the creation of numerous “garden habitats” which attract rich biodiversity! Isn’t it beautiful?
Gardens in LULCC
Our country’s beautiful gardens are a product of LULCC as well, so is it fair to say that LULCC isn’t that bad after all? That is up to you to decide for yourself.
The difference between gardens and natural forests is that gardens contain the “human touch”. Gardens are created primarily for the benefit of humans, but they provide a safe haven for our local biodiversity to flourish as well, albeit in a different way.
Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves, are we willing to accept the fact that gardens might become our main form of interaction with the natural world, or should natural greenery still be our utmost priority?
