SINGAPORE – Surrounded by birdsong and clicking cicadas, Britain’s Prince William and Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Lawrence Wong took a walk through the island’s largest nature reserve on Wednesday morning.
High up in the canopy, the duo strolled along the TreeTop Walk’s 25m-tall suspension bridge in the Central Catchment Nature Reserve, and got a bird’s-eye view of some of Singapore’s richest forests in terms of biodiversity.
The Prince, who arrived in Singapore on Sunday, is on a four-day working visit here. On Tuesday, he had attended the 2023 Earthshot Prize awards ceremony. It is an initiative he founded, where five winners are given £1 million (S$1.66 million) each annually for solutions to tackle the world’s biggest environmental challenges.
During the hour-long visit to the reserve on Wednesday, Prince William and DPM Wong met four representatives from the National Parks Board’s (NParks) Youth Stewards for Nature programme.
Launched in 2021, the programme involves NParks mentoring young volunteers, aged 18 to 25, to carry out nature-related projects such as species population surveys and designing therapeutic gardens.
Speaking to the representatives, Prince William joked: “Sorry, it took us a while, we’ve been chatting and sweating and doing a lot of walking.”
Youth steward Muhammad Nasry Abdul Nasir, 24, said the Prince’s support for these green causes was meaningful and filled him with “a lot of hope”, as he felt such issues were “typically relegated to the sidelines in the national conversations on policy”.
Under the programme, Mr Nasry helped organise the World Wildlife Day Regional Youth Symposium in 2023, the second iteration of the initiative that raises awareness of conservation efforts in South-east Asia.
The second-year environmental earth systems science student at Nanyang Technological University also leads the Singapore Youth Voices for Biodiversity, a group that represents youth in consultation with government agencies on local biodiversity policy.
Mr Nasry told The Straits Times he was surprised by the Prince’s casual manner. The group were chatting at a hut near a fruiting cempedak (or jackfruit) tree, which reminded Prince William of durians and the time when he tasted the “king of fruits”.
Ms Alexis Goh, 24, a youth steward currently working at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, said: “He was very candid and shared with us about how he actually tried eating durian.
“He was not too fond of it but at least he tried it.”
NParks’ group director for conservation Lim Liang Jim said the TreeTop Walk was selected for the Prince to visit in order to showcase Singapore’s tropical lowland rainforest and conservation management efforts.
“Beyond offering views of the forest canopy, it provides researchers with access to carry out surveys and plant identification work,” he said.
During the walk, the Prince of Wales also met Dr Isabelle Lackman, a finalist in the 2022 Earthshot Prize. She co-founded Hutan, a research organisation based in Borneo that studies and monitors the region’s biodiversity, from wild orang utan and elephant research to hornbill and frog surveys.
Introducing the organisation to DPM Wong, Prince William said: “They do fantastic work with orang utans.”
The five winners of the 2023 Earthshot Prize were announced on Tuesday evening at Mediacorp Campus, which marked the first time the ceremony was held in Asia.
The winners were:
- S4S Technologies in the Build A Waste-Free World category
- California-headquartered soil carbon marketplace Boomitra in the Fix Our Climate category
- Hong Kong-based sustainable battery firm GRST in the Clean Our Air category
- San Francisco-based wildlife conservation organisation WildAid in the Revive Our Oceans category
- Forest-restoration initiative Accion Andina, which is based in the Andes mountains in the Protect And Restore Nature category
Prince William, who leaves Singapore on Wednesday, also attended the United for Wildlife Global Summit on Monday. The Prince and the Royal Foundation launched United for Wildlife in 2014 to tackle the illegal wildlife trade.
