Diamond

Problem Statement

Background Context

Climate change is a global challenge and existential threat to Singapore. It has brought rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns, which Singapore is particularly vulnerable to as a low-lying island state. For example, warmer weather can lead to health risks — Singapore has had 122 more dangerous heat days in the past year alone, and daily average temperatures in Singapore could rise by 5°C by the end of the century. Heavier rainstorms can cause flooding and damage to physical infrastructure — PUB has spent $2 billion on drainage infrastructure in the last decade, and firms are spending tens of thousands of dollars on measures to cope with extreme weather.

Climate change can also disrupt global supply chains and threaten access to food, water and energy, all of which Singapore does not produce on our own and are heavily reliant on exports. Hence it is in Singapore’s interests to tackle the perils of climate change by pursuing sustainable development.

Public Sector Commitment to Sustainability

The Government has committed for the public sector to lead the way to pursue sustainable development. The specific goal is for Singapore to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. To this end, the GreenGov.sg initiative was launched in 2021, and intended to be a key enabler of the Singapore Green Plan 2030.

The inaugural GreenGov.sg report was published in 2023, and details the emissions profile and resource footprint of the public sector for Financial Year (FY) 2022 running from 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023. The report provides a snapshot of the public sector’s latest performance on greenhouse gas emissions, energy and water use. It covers the public sector’s assets in Singapore, including office buildings, healthcare facilities, schools, public utilities, installations, public transport infrastructure and vehicles. This enables the public sector to track progress towards our targets.

Environmental Data Reporting by Public Sector

Whole-of-Government (WOG) agencies have been reporting their environmental data required for the annual GreenGov.sg report since it was launched. Based on user interviews, the typical process that sustainability managers in each agency goes through each month is as follows:

1. Collect and gather the required data from various sources, including but not limited to:

   • Utilities bills

   • Public waste collectors (PWC)

   • BCA Green Mark Certification

   • Other IOT sensors, such as Trusted Centres for Sensors (TCS) data

2. Organise and aggregate the data as necessary

3. Calculate the amount of carbon-equivalent emissions based on a pre-defined formula

4. Input data into a central data repository platform

Pain Points in Environmental Data Reporting

Agencies encounter two major pain points in the process:

1. The current data collection, processing and reporting process of many agencies today still remain largely manual and time-consuming. This takes up at least a full day cumulatively per month to get the data ready for reporting, and another half a day to input data into the repository. Some factors include:

   1. Fragmented and fractured data, including distributed ownership and sources of data,

   2. The environmental data collected needs to go through subsequent processing required (e.g. aggregation, calculation)

   3. Human errors in data entry or inaccurate auto-populated data pulled from various sources, which are difficult to reverse in the current system

2. Agencies hope to move beyond data reporting to visualising how their data contributes to the trend over time, and surface actionable insights.

Proposed Solution

The environmental data that agencies are required to report span many diverse areas, namely energy, water, waste, building, vehicles and infocomm technology. As a first step, we scoped down the problem to focus on electricity consumption data.

We believed that redesigning the user flow to minimise errors from manual data input can solve the pain point of data submitted being inaccurate. We scoped down the problem to electricity consumption for a start, and built a prototype that allows users to upload utilities bills. The bill is then parsed by the system to extract the relevant electricity consumption data required for reporting. This can be expanded to other types and categories of environmental data if successful.

A peculiar challenge associated with electricity consumption data is that the bill is inaccurate every other month. This is because electricity consumption has typically been measured with cumulative meters, which are read only every other month. Units are billed for their estimated consumption based on an EMA-approved methodology on months that the meter is not read, then adjusted in subsequent months for actual usage. This sometimes causes consumption to be reflected as negative.

[Note: Advanced meters, which measure consumption at half-hourly intervals, will be installed progressively across Singapore by 2026.]

The data extracted from bills can be stored in a data lake, then visualised in a dashboard that shows historical trends of utilities consumption and details about which business units have the highest consumption. This allows sustainability managers to zoom in on specific business areas to design more targeted interventions to reduce consumption where possible and feasible.

User Flow

1. Officer uploads the utilities bill of electricity consumption monthly

2. The bill is parsed with AI to extract electricity consumption data required for reporting. The extracted data is stored in a data lake, and used to auto-populate the relevant data fields in the eGreenGov portal.

3. The extracted data can also be used for meaningful visualisation to surface insights, such as any anomalies in electricity consumption trends, business units with highest consumption, and verify whether interventions to reduce electricity consumption have been effective.

Outcomes & Impact

We hope to improve the process of data flows and accuracy of data being piped directly from various sources, including but not limited to waste output and data from IoT sensors. Put together, these data would be able to paint a more complete picture of how agencies can work to accelerate progress towards environmental targets.

For data that cannot be automatically pulled and still have to be entered manually, we hope to eventually reduce the time and effort taken by agencies to gather, process and report environmental data.

The metrics we are preliminarily interested in improving are:

• Accuracy and richness of environmental data being reported

• Time taken to collect data per month

• Time taken to clean and process data to make them fit for reporting

With easier data reporting, we also envision potential savings in man-hours, which can be roughly translated to cost savings.

We assume:

1 man-hour saved per working day x 5 working days x 52 weeks x 17 Ministry-equivalent entities = 4,420 man-hours saved

This roughly translates to cost savings of SGD 101,796.60 to SGD 420,784.00, based on salary estimates for entry level sustainability professionals for the lower bound and Heads of Sustainability in organisations for upper bound.

Next Steps & Future Vision

Public sentiment towards climate change is at an all time low. In a 2024 survey, less than half (43.7%) of the Singaporean respondents viewed climate change as “a serious and immediate threat to the well-being of my country”, a significant decline from 66.4% in 2021. This makes the work of environmental data reporting and visualisation all the more important and urgent to surface insights for more targeted positive climate action. The ultimate aim of our project is to ensure the effectiveness of agencies’ interventions to reduce carbon-equivalent emissions, and measuring our performance through environmental data reporting is a necessary first step.

If you are a public service agency interested in being an early user, exploring a pilot, or collaborating on the design and development of this platform, please get in touch with us at diamond@open.gov.sg.

Team

Diamond was conceptualised and built by a multi-disciplinary team who believes in sustainable development.

Special thanks goes to the following people and groups who have contributed to our work in one way or another:

• Designers: Park Se Hyun, Natalie Tan, Tiffany Chan, Prasanth Kumaar

• Partners: MSE Public Sector Sustainability Office & GovTech Digital Sustainability Office

• Users: EDB, MOH, NLB, and other public service officers