The Prince of Wales in Singapore
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The Prince of Wales visits Singapore
The Prince of Wales travelled to Singapore for the third annual Earthshot Prize Awards Ceremony. During his trip, His Royal Highness spent time meeting Singaporeans and learning about how local organisations are working to protect and restore our planet – from tackling the illegal wildlife trade and protecting the rainforest to incubating and scaling cutting edge innovations. He also attended the United for Wildlife Global Summit 2023.
Jewel Changi
On arrival in Singapore, The Prince visited Jewel, a nature themed complex located at the gateway of the country, for a special event welcoming him to the city and marking the start of the countdown to The Earthshot Prize Awards.
HRH visited the iconic HSBC Rain Vortex, the world’s largest and tallest indoor waterfall. He then spent time meeting Singaporeans during a walkabout at the Shiseido Forest Valley, the indoor garden located in Jewel.
Dragon Boating
On his second day in Singapore, The Prince joined locals, British expats living in Singapore and representatives from across the Commonwealth for a morning of dragon boating against a backdrop of Singapore’s most famous landmarks.
Dragon boating is a popular sport in Singapore with many nations, including the UK, having expat teams based there. The British Dragons formed as a club in 2000, with support from the British Chamber of Commerce, with 70 members from 16 nationalities, including Singapore, Australia, Canada, India, Malaysia, South Africa, Nigeria, and Malawi.
During the engagement, His Royal Highness joined the British Dragons on the water in a 22-seater boat. They undertook a warm-up and some practice trials alongside a team of British Dragons made up of members from Commonwealth countries. Once back on land, The Prince joined a small group of the British Dragons for a conversation about the role that the dragon boating community plays for them as expats living in Singapore.
Audiences with the President and Prime Minister of Singapore
The Prince of Wales then travelled to The Istana where he met the President of Singapore, Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
United for Wildlife Global Summit
The Prince then spoke at the United for Wildlife Global Summit 2023. The summit brought global leaders from conservation, law enforcement and government together with United for Wildlife’s private sector Taskforce members to exchange the latest ideas, learnings, and best practice in their shared mission to combat the illegal wildlife trade.
By working collaboratively with the transport and finance sectors, building key partnerships with law enforcement and NGOs, and sharing information and best practices across the sectors, and across borders, United for Wildlife is disrupting this criminal network globally.
As a leading global financial centre and one of Asia’s largest trading hubs, Singapore’s infrastructure and expertise make it a vital partner in tackling the Illegal Wildlife Trade with several notable successes in this area to date. In 2021, United for Wildlife founded its Southeast Asia Chapter which has gone on to identify previously untapped opportunities to collaborate and find solutions in the region.
The Earthshot Prize 2023
A key moment in The Prince’s trip to Singapore was the third annual Earthshot Prize Awards Ceremony which took place on Tuesday at the Theatre at Mediacorp.
Acción Andina, GRST, WildAid Marine Program, S4S Technologies, and Boomitra were named 2023 winners and will each receive £1 million to support them in scaling their innovative climate and environmental solutions.
The five winners were chosen from among the 15 innovators and entrepreneurs named as 2023 Earthshot Prize Finalists. The work of this third group of Earthshot Prize Winners spans the globe, protecting and restoring the environment and supporting local communities across six continents.
EcoLabs Centre of Innovation for Energy
On day three, The Prince visited EcoLabs, an innovation cluster focused on building and accelerating environmental tech companies in Singapore.
EcoLabs supports energy sector start-ups, SMEs and corporates to innovate andduring his visit, His Royal Highness saw this in action with a tour of the Energy Research Institute at Nanyang Technological University research laboratory before moving to EcoLabs where he met representatives from start-ups that have been supported by it.
Tree Top Walk
The morning after the Awards, The Prince took in Singapore’s rainforests as he embarked on the iconic TreeTop Walk, which is the highlight of several long hiking routesin the region.
His Royal Highness’ route saw him cross the free-standing suspension bridge which connects the two highest points on the route, Bukit Peirce and Bukit Kalang. It offers a bird's eye view of the community of plants and animals that live in the forest canopy.
Besides providing an avenue for nature recreation for Singaporeans and visitors, the TreeTop Walk also plays an important role in forest canopy research, providing access to an area that many researchers were not previously able to reach.
Eartshot+
The Prince attended Earthshot+, a day of thought-provoking conversations aimed at multiplying the impact of The Earthshot Prize.
The Prince joined Christiana Figueres (Trustee of The Earthshot Prize) and Brandon Ng (Co-Founder and CEO of Ampd Energy, 2022 Earthshot Prize Finalist) on stage for a conversation about the importance of the Earthshot Decade.
Centre for Wildlife Forensics
Following on from his attendance at the United for Wildlife Global Summit earlier in the week, The Prince saw how Singapore is working to improve enforcement against poaching and trafficking at source when he visited the Centre for Wildlife Forensics.
His Royal Highness was shown seized items including ivory, pangolin scales and shark fins, as well as the ways an app developed by Microsoft is used to identify species..
Singapore has put in place a whole-of-government approach to combat the illegal trade in CITES-listed species and The Centre for Wildlife Forensics is Singapore’s first national facility for wildlife forensics.
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