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. 2024 Oct 18;56(4):555-575.
doi: 10.1080/14672715.2024.2414376. eCollection 2024.

Reclaiming Resilience Through Granular Arbitrage: Anticipating Sea Level Rise in Singapore

Affiliations

Reclaiming Resilience Through Granular Arbitrage: Anticipating Sea Level Rise in Singapore

William Jamieson. Crit Asian Stud. .

Abstract

Over the last sixty ears, Singapore has expanded its land footprint over twenty-five percent by reclaiming land from the sea. Its outsized demand for sand to resource these projects has rendered regional sand markets precarious, and successive countries have banned sand exports to Singapore. Nevertheless, the Singapore government has committed to spending $SG one billion (US$ 767 million) a year until 2100 to mitigate sea level rise. While this includes a range of strategies, from improving drainage infrastructure to exploring adaptive solutions, in the main this involves reclaiming vast amounts of land from the sea to act as a bulwark against rising tides. These plans for resilience will be examined through the spectre of Long Island, a proposed project that will act as a barrier against sea level rise and incorporate nature-based solutions that are emblematic of resilience fetishism, all the while obscuring the more foundational element of this resilience, which is sand that will be obtained through granular arbitrage.

Keywords: Singapore; granular geography; land reclamation; resilience; sea level rise.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Map of sea level rise used in former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s 2019 National Rally Day speech. Source: Government of Singapore.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Map of sea level rise for Singapore’s east coast region used in former Prim e Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s 2019 National Rally Day speech. Source: Government of Singapore.

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