How to Make Responsible, Environmentally Friendly Green Investments to Fight Climate Change

Rising sea levels pose a significant threat to Singapore as a low lying island. Much of the island is only 15m above sea level, and 30% of the land in the island state is just 5m above sea level.

Water Resources

It is well known among Singaporeans that water management is a top priority Singapore, whether it be sourcing potable water sources for public consumption or managing the rainfalls and preventing flooding in urban areas. Both of these tasks could face detrimental impacts from climate change. Periods of drought affects the reliability of our supply of potable water whilst an increase in intensity of rainfall could overwhelm existing drainage infrastructure and cause flooding.

Related: Should You Care if Your Car Insurance Plan Covers Flood Damage?

Public Health Impact

One of the impacts of climate change that people rarely consider is the effect a changing climate can have on public health.

Singapore is situated in a region where vector-borne diseases are endemic. In layman’s terms, that means that animal borne diseases such as Dengue are a permanent fixture in the lives of Singaporeans.

There is a strong correlation between case numbers of such vector-borne diseases and the warmer periods of the year, meaning that as average temperatures continue to rise and warm periods occupy more of the year, there will be a correlating rise in the cases of such diseases. Furthermore, the increasing average temperatures themselves will be a source of heat stress, and a health hazard particularly for the elderly and the sick.

What Is Greenwashing?

Greenwashing is the practice of presenting, confusing, misleading or even outright false information about a company’s positive environmental impact. Greenwashing is not a new nor foreign phenomena, with the term first being introduced in the 1980s.

An unfortunate reality is that since eco-friendly products charge a premium, many companies are incentivised to play up just how green their products are, playing on the emotions of the consumer rather than the merits of the products to encourage customers to purchase it. This means that as a consumer or investor, you would have to put in the work to decipher if companies are truly upholding their environmental claims or if they are just out to maximise their profits.

How Do I Spot Greenwashing?

To make an investment decision that truly environmentally conscious, we must be able to separate genuinely environmentally conscious companies from those greenwashing.

So how can we spot greenwashing? One way to spot greenwashing is to look out for common greenwashing brand tactics such as using fluffy language and buzzwords. Companies participating in greenwashing have little to show for environmentally friendly efforts. Their claims of their product’s ostensible environmental benefits will often be vague. For example, a company may describe their product as having a lower environmental impact without giving any evidence of how it achieves this. In the case that the manufacturer is unable or unwilling to be transparent about the manufacturing process, the actual positive environmental impact could be negligible.

Another form of greenwashing is called hypocrisies greenwashing. This is the use of deceptive marketing such as marketing a product’s use as sustainable when it’s manufacture continues to use environmentally damaging methods.

Evocative imagery, such as a picture of flowers growing out of an exhaust pipe, is another market strategy that can be used to imply an eco friendly ethos without making outright claims of eco friendly efforts. This is a common way companies wrap an environmentally damaging product in clever marketing to imply an eco-friendly theme.