Singapore is leading the world on multiple levels:
- world’s fastest average peak internet speed
- ranked first for “ease of doing business” by the World Bank
- third in Bloomberg’s 2018 Innovation Index
- ranked sixth on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index
- first in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Health Ranking
This is incredible progress considering Singapore was a polluted backwater in 1965.
Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore, was instrumental in Singapore’s economic development. His philosophy was, “If you make a city a nice place to live, people will come and invest.”
Making Singapore a nice place to live required a collective appreciation for the environment, which mandated investments in public education.
Instilling a biosphere awareness into society was the key to making Singapore the clean, organized, and efficient city it is today. Students are filled with an appreciation for biodiversity and green space at an early age.
We can all learn something from Singapore.
My inspiration for this post was this fascinating article from the United Nations Environment Programme on Singapore’s economic development and its emphasis on biodiversity.
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