Up to 60,000 trees are planted each year by NParks under various community schemes
Grace Chua, Straits Times 21 Nov 08;
A WAVE of tree planting is sweeping across Singapore as everyone, from schoolchildren to MPs, pitches in to combat climate change and environmental degradation.
About 50,000 to 60,000 trees are planted each year by the National Parks Board (NParks) under various community schemes, a number that has been rising steadily since Singapore launched a drive four decades ago to cover the island in green.
Last Saturday, local firm ST Engineering set a national record by planting 2,008 trees in Admiralty Park.
Meanwhile, annual tree-planting days have been held by communities islandwide this month.
At a Jalan Besar GRC tree-planting day last week, Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts Lee Boon Yang remarked: 'We must have planted more than a million trees over the years.'
In fact, 1.3 million trees, from angsanas to tembusus, have been planted since 1967 when Singapore launched the Garden City programme to cover the island with greenery.
The push sprung from the idea that tree-planting has environmental benefits on both the global and local levels. Trees take in carbon dioxide from the air, sucking up tonnes of the compound that causes global warming.
Shade from rooftop gardens is also estimated to lower local ambient temperatures by up to 4 deg C. Roadside trees also filter soot from traffic exhaust.
The push to green Singapore has been proven to be successful. The land area covered by greenery increased from 36 per cent in 1987 to 47 per cent last year, despite the fact that the population nearly doubled in the same period.
The Government's first tree-planting campaign, in 1963, hoped to yield just over 10,000 trees.
The campaign was launched as Singapore's early development had seen many trees cut down for buildings and plantations.
Even in the 1950s, the business district remained treeless.
Mr Simon Longman, NParks' director of streetscape, arrived in Singapore in the early 1980s to find the roadside vegetation still 'patchy'.
'Some roads, such as East Coast Parkway, were planted well, but on others the trees were not so pervasive,' he said.
Early in the Garden City campaign, Mr Longman explained, relatively fast-growing trees such as angsanas, raintrees and yellow flames were used. These flowered a few years after planting, and took about 25 years to grow to full height.
In the mid-80s and 90s, flowering trees such as the trumpet tree (Tabebuia rosea), with its pink flowers, were planted to add colour to the landscape.
Today, there is an effort to increase biodiversity among trees here, by planting a wide variety of South-east Asian species such as the sea gutta (Pouteria obovata) and the pong-pong (Cerbera odollam), from which the Katong neighbourhood got its name.
Planting a tree can cost between $50 and $200.
