Ideas for coastal protection from S’pore tertiary students good enough to consider: PUB
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Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and the Environment Baey Yam Keng and PUB chief excutive Goh Si Hou (right) with some of the winners of the Design Ideas Competition for local tertiary institutes.
ST PHOTO: GIN TAY
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SINGAPORE – Glass outlook decks and boardwalks integrated into elevated structures that act as walkways for users to observe the waves or coastal habitats.
These are some of the proposals from a competition on coastal protection measures prompted by climate change that national water agency PUB can consider implementing, said PUB Coastal Protection Department director Hazel Khoo.
This comes as the mean sea level is projected to rise by up to by 2100.
Concept plans for coastal protection in the City-East Coast plan will be shared “some time next year”, added Ms Khoo.
The south-eastern part of the island covers 57.8km of the coastline across Changi, the stretch between the East Coast area and Marina Bay, and the Greater Southern Waterfront district.
Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and the Environment Baey Yam Keng gave out the awards to nine winners out of 32 entries for the Design Ideas Competition for local tertiary institutes at the Environment Building on Saturday.
More than 110 students from eight local tertiary institutes took part in the competition, which was launched in February.
The designs for their entries are based on three coastal typologies for the south-eastern coast: an urban promenade lined with attractive commercial and residential developments; a nature-centred coastline featuring nature and greenery; and an accessible waterfront public space for leisure so that people can get closer to the water.
One of the winning entries, Trifoliate Horizon, which proposed building a jetty that is more elevated than the existing jetty at Labrador Park to counter the rising sea level, was from undergraduates from the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Nanyang Technological University.
Team member Yeong Yoong Sze, 22, said the proposed jetty would have a fibreglass walkway to allow for photosynthesis to take place underneath, hence encouraging biodiversity.
The team also won another award for Emerald Coast at East Coast, which proposed three islands that string Changi City to Founders’ Memorial.
Another winning entry, from a team of master’s students from the National University of Singapore, is called Island Chain.
It proposed to use prefabricated hollow concrete blocks known as caisson blocks to build a sea wall along Long Island, which the Urban Redevelopment Authority is planning to reclaim along the south-eastern coast, from Marina East to Changi.
Team member Atharv Raj Manwani, 24, explained that caisson blocks, which were successfully implemented at the Tuas Megaport project, can help reduce construction time, unlike the conventional reclamation method, which takes between 30 and 35 years to stabilise.
“Conventional reclamation is also very bad for biodiversity because you are throwing sand into the area,” he added.
Winners were given their awards during a coastal protection engagement session, the second phase of PUB’s Our Coastal Conversation (OCC) series.
The first phase of OCC for the City-East Coast was launched in October 2022.
More than 50 participants, comprising stakeholders, who include residents living in the area marked out to be the Greater Southern Waterfront,
One participant, Ms Agnes Soh, wished the conversation on Saturday had included areas beyond the Greater Southern Waterfront, which would have a coastline stretching from Pasir Panjang Ferry Terminal to HarbourFront Centre and VivoCity before ending at Marina Barrage.
The landscape architect said: “I think it’s not just looking at things in silo – it’s really having a conversation that involves multiple stakeholders on a wider level.”
She added: “There’s also limited land use. There’s also biodiversity, which is something that you cannot recover once you damage it.
“To be creative and make use of land, sea, and everything in between, we should build flexible infrastructure that comes with hybrid nature-based solutions that are multifunctional.”
