Several buildings and landmarks around the Marina Bay area will switch their usual façade lighting to green for a grand total of four hours on Dec. 12 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, and signify Singapore's commitment to build sustainable cities.

According to a joint press release by the National Climate Change Secretariat, Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment, and Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), this change in lighting will last from 7pm to 11pm.

Buildings and landmarks that will switch to green lighting are:

• National Gallery Singapore,
• Marina Bay Sands,
• Millenia Tower,
• Suntec City Convention Centre,
• Marina Square,
• South Beach,
• Ocean Financial Centre,
• OCBC Centres,
• Helix Bridge,
• Cavenagh Bridge,
• Anderson Bridge, and
• Republic Plaza.

The campaign was launched by C40, a network of megacities committed to realising the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Other C40 cities expected to participate in the green lighting initiative are Austin, Boston, Lisbon, New York City, San Francisco, Venice, Paris and Seoul.

Singapore has set a target of peaking emissions in 2030

The press release further added that Singapore submitted the following two items to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in March 2020:

• The Enhanced Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), which aims to peak emissions at 65 Metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2e) around 2030, and
• The Long-Term Low-Emissions Development Strategy (LEDS) that aspires to halve emissions from their peak to 33 MtCO2e by 2050, and to achieve net-zero emissions as soon as viable in the second half of the century.

Note that the CO2e unit represents an amount of a greenhouse gas (GHG) whose atmospheric impact has been standardized to that of one unit mass of carbon dioxide (CO2), based on the global warming potential (GWP) of the gas.

Singapore is also due to submit to the UNFCCC, at the end of December 2020, a fourth Biennial Update Report (BUR) outlining the country’s mitigation measures to fulfil its 2020 climate commitment of reducing emissions by 16 per cent below 2020 business-as-usual (BAU) levels.

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Top image from Marina Bay Sands Facebook.