Minister for Trade and Industry Mr Chan Chun Sing,
President of the Assembly and Chair of the Council of the Global Green Growth Institute Mr Ban Ki-moon,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen

Good evening to all of you. I hope you had an interesting day of learning, sharing, and networking.

I always come away from Ecosperity learning something new or deepening my knowledge about something I thought I knew about, and I hope you all felt that you got as much out of it as we could give you, in terms of the content.

As you know, our focus for this year’s Ecosperity is “Clean Earth”. This morning, Temasek Chairman Mr Lim Boon Heng and many of the speakers said that we are at a tipping point – we can no longer ignore the serious impact of climate change on our planet.

No matter where in the world you come from, we’re all experiencing warmer temperatures and as a consequence, a more volatile climate. With a hotter Earth, we face more destructive hurricanes, mega storms, and huge forest fires. Climate change is already devastating lives.

A hotter Earth also means rising sea levels, which are now rising at a much faster rate than we thought possible. If left unchecked, billions of people who live in coastal areas¹ will be at risk. According to the UN’s latest Ocean report, that’s around one-third of the world’s population. I want to emphasise just how urgent this task is, in front of all of us.

We all want to play our part to make a difference, to make a positive impact on this Earth of ours.

We also appreciate that in order to do more and continue our quest to do good in our communities, we must first do well in our businesses. However, our purpose in business is not to do well only for ourselves – it is to do well so that we can do good in our communities.

We are also determined to do right as a forward looking institution. That includes evolving our organisations from time to time, including job redesign; creating and recreating jobs; skilling, reskilling and upskilling our workers. The more relevant and skilled they are, the more they will accept the need for the changes we must make to protect our planet.

We coined the word “Ecosperity” back in 2014, as you heard earlier today: the idea being that prosperity can go hand in hand with protecting our planet for future generations. At that time, Ecosperity was just a one-day conference with about 200 delegates. It’s been quite an exciting and impactful journey for us since then.

Today, there were about 1,200 delegates who were registered for the Ecosperity Conference. That’s six times more than we had when we first started in 2014.

Last year, Ecosperity partnered UNLEASH, a global innovation workshop that brought 1,000 youths to Singapore to conceive and deliver solutions to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

This year, Ecosperity has evolved into a week-long event with multiple activities and programmes. There are more than 10 specially curated partner events by the World Bank Group, the EU Commission, as well as international and Singapore agencies – all aimed at combating the challenges brought about by climate change.

As you can see, we’re very focused on the ‘how’ of sustainable development this time around, and I’m glad to share that our inaugural Ecosperity Week welcomed 3,500 global business leaders, policymakers, investors, entrepreneurs and academics.

Two distinguished leaders on climate change have joined us tonight. They will share their views and insights on this very important topic. Our keynote speaker needs no introduction. He is Mr Ban Ki-moon, President of the Assembly & Chair of the Council of the Global Green Growth Institute, and the former Secretary-General of the United Nations

He successfully initiated global action to combat climate change and used the authority of his mandate as Secretary-General to raise global awareness of the need for climate action, and its urgency. This culminated in the adoption of the landmark Paris Agreement in 2016. Mr Ban continues to drive the green growth model of development, and I’m sure we will learn a lot from him about this later this evening.

Later in the evening, we will hear from our second speaker, Mr Robert Swan. Mr Swan is a polar explorer who has the distinction of being the first person in history to walk to both the North and South Poles. He will share his experiences of the effects of climate change, and how that has led him to his mission to preserve the Antarctica – the Earth’s last great wilderness.

One of our founding fathers, Mr S. Rajaratnam, said this in the first National Day message after the independence of Singapore. He said, “We must do things today, with tomorrow clearly on our minds”. As we saw from the words at the end of the presentation, tomorrow starts today.

I’m pleased and privileged to now invite Mr Ban to deliver his keynote address.

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¹Source: UN Ocean Report; defined as living within 100km of the coast.