Ladies and Gentlemen

Good morning,

1. I am pleased to join you this morning at the official launch of the Centre for Urban Greenery and Ecology, or CUGE in short. To our foreign guests, I extend a warm welcome to Singapore and the Botanic Gardens.

THE HORTICULTURE AND LANDSCAPE INDUSTRY

2. The provision for greenery has always featured prominently in our urban planning and development as a key strategy to enhance our living environment. Our Garden City reputation was built on 40 years of relentless commitment to green up our city. Moving forward, with increased urbanization and development, we need to redouble our effort in greening Singapore so as to sustain the quality living environment.

3. Our vision is to transform the Garden City into a “City in a Garden”. To achieve this, we have exciting projects in the pipeline. Some of these have been announced and are familiar to the public, such as the Gardens by the Bay, the Active, Beautiful and Clean Waters Programme, and the Park Connector Network.

4. All these will translate into exciting opportunities for NParks as well as for the horticulture and landscape industry. To leverage on the opportunities, manpower and skills development must be geared up. The work ahead will be more challenging, both in scale and complexity. To succeed, not only will we need more people in this sector, we will also need more highly skilled people.

5. Based on an industry survey conducted by NParks, industry manpower is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 4% over the next 5 years. By 2009, we will be looking at a total industry workforce of 22,000. This will comprise professionals, managers, executives and technicians across different sectors of the industry, such as landscape construction, landscape maintenance, landscape design & architecture, arboriculture, horticulture, nursery and turf management.

CENTRE FOR URBAN GREENERY AND ECOLOGY

6. In this regard, the establishment of CUGE is timely. Set up by the collaborative efforts of the National Parks Board and the Singapore Workforce Development Agency, it is a strategic initiative to build up the manpower capability of the horticulture and landscape industry. CUGE will provide skills training for all levels of the industry workforce, including workers, supervisors, managers and professionals. It aims to train more than 20% of the landscape workforce by 2009.

7. CUGE fulfills a critical role as a national training institution for Landscape Workforce Skills Qualifications (WSQ) System. Workers in the industry can now have direct access to WSQ training. They can also qualify for course fee subsidy without going through their employers. To date, 82 workers have received the WSQ certificate in Landscape Operations. To provide further options for professional development, we aim to introduce the WSQ Advanced Certificate in Landscape Supervision and WSQ Diploma in Landscape Management by the end of this year.

8. Besides providing training for landscape workers, CUGE will also serve as a platform for developing and sharing of expertise and best practices for practicing professionals in the industry. This will include organizing seminar series with overseas experts, as well as providing professional certifications in areas such as horticulture, arboriculture, nursery management, vertical greening and environmental sustainability.

9. In the longer term, CUGE will be positioned as a regional centre for advancing and sharing of knowledge and expertise in urban greenery and ecology to enhance the urban living environment.

10. At this point, I would like to express our appreciation to our network of friends, including several from overseas, who are here to support the launch of CUGE. Your support and collaboration is essential for CUGE. You will bring in fresh knowledge and enable CUGE to benchmark itself against good institutions abroad.

11. I am happy to learn that the Centre has tied up with the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) to start training tree care practitioners for the ISA certification. CUGE will be training 60 tree care practitioners for ISA certification each year. In fact, it has recently completed an ISA professional training and certification programme for a group of tree care professionals from Hong Kong. It will continue to extend this training to practitioners in the region. The Centre is also working with experts from Australia to design a certification programme for practising horticulturists. We hope to launch the programme later this year for the first group of 20 trainees from Singapore and in the region.

12. This morning, more ties will be formed as we witness the signing of the various Memoranda of Collaboration between CUGE and the following organizations:

On behalf of NParks, I thank the signatories for making this special effort to conclude the Memoranda of Collaboration at the launch ceremony today.

CONCLUSION

13. In conclusion, I would like to thank all of you here today once again for giving this event your support. I also urge the local industry partners to contribute your experience and expertise to CUGE, and help make this Centre a collective success for the industry. On this note, it gives me great pleasure to declare the Centre for Urban Greenery and Ecology open.

Thank You.

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