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S4F, which was founded by students from Yale-NUS College, has campaigned for Singapore’s universities to transition away from their partnerships with the fossil fuel industry since 2017; since 2022, it has operated as a coalition of students from universities across the city-state.
Co-founder Rachel Tey told Eco-Business that sustaining student interest in a campaign that has taken establishment institutions to task over their relationships with Big Oil has been challenging, and the group will now be run on a minimal structure and operate on a project basis.
S4F has argued in its campaigns that oil and gas majors have an unhealthy influence over the city-state’s education system, which potentially limits academic freedom to freely criticise the environmental impact of fossil fuels.
Though founded by students from Singapore’s first liberal arts college, which is set to close this year, S4F has steadily added members from National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Management University and Singapore University of Technology and Design over the years.
It will continue to work with other civil society groups and social justice movements and serve as a resource hub for students or other activists interested in launching their own campaigns, said Tey.
She said that “playing the long game without seeing change” has been among the challenges the group has faced. A scorecard S4F launched in 2023 found that Singapore’s top universities have made “little to no progress” in phasing out the influence of the oil and gas industry since it launched its campaign.
Divestment movements have a long history among United States student activists and campaigners, and have scored major wins, with educational institutions committing to pull investments in polluting companies.
But they have not sustained momentum in Singapore. The city-state’s universities have not publicly divested any fossil fuel assets in response to the campaign.
Four of the main universities targeted by S4F have said they were working to integrate environmental, social and governance (ESG) into educational programmes and operations – including how university endowments are invested – but have not commented on reducing the influence of dirty energy companies on campus.
In a report published in 2022, Fossil-Fuelled Universities, the group said that Singapore’s universities had inadvertently been caught in the greenwashing campaigns of fossil fuel companies, and have been co-opted as a platform to market their efforts in green technologies “to hide their destructive activities and rebrand their image.”
NTUDivest, the student body campaigning for NTU to divestment from fossil fuels, spoke out against a low-carbon solutions hub launched at NTU last year supported by oil giant ExxonMobil. NTUDivest said that an oil major with a history of climate policy obstruction sponsoring a climate tech hub was a conflict of interests.
Tey added that recruiting new members has become increasingly difficult for S4F. “There is a higher barrier of entry to people who care about the environment, who may struggle with understanding why we are positioned intentionally as against the status quo and feel uncomfortable with a potential ‘activist’ label,” she said.
Building and sustaining a movement like S4F requires robust systems of continuous labour, and constant revision and growth, which the group has lacked in recent times, she added. Many of the students who started S4F have now graduated, which has made the movement difficult to sustain.
She added that working for an anti-establishment campaign group in Singapore is “thankless, difficult labour.”
“The work is almost as if we were starting up an entirely new business, except without receiving any pay or tangible returns to sustain ourselves,” she said.
Phasing down S4F now would enable the group to grow over the longer term, she said. “Slowing down now teaches me to recognise and honour the phases of a movement, as one would in the natural cycles of life.”
Supporters of Students for a Fossil Free Future at a Singapore Climate Rally event. The coalition has been pushing for the city’s universities to divest from fossil fuels and taxes on major polluters. Image: S4F
Waning climate activism in Singapore?
S4F’s pause reflects a general decline in climate activism in Singapore in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic, say observers.
SG Climate Rally, which staged Singapore’s first climate rally in 2019, will not be holding an in-person rally this year, instead opting for a scorecard assessment of the climate credentials of Singapore’s political candidates, called Greenwatch. The numbers of attendees has fallen since 2019, when more than 2,000 people attended, and 2023, the second in-person rally, when around 1,400 attended. SG Climate Rally held a virtual event in 2021.
A spokesperson for SG Climate Rally told Eco-Business that the group is not slowing down in terms of volunteer recruitment and membership expansion – it recruited more than 20 people to work on its Greenwatch campaign – but has noticed stalling in social media engagement and growth in new followers.
“The feeling I get among other climate groups is that with so many global issues ongoing, climate issues are somewhat down the list as a priority for many people,” said a SG Climate Rally spokesperson.
Ho Xiang Tian, co-founder of environmental non-profit LepakInSG, said that support for young climate groups such as Singapore Youth for Climate Action (SYCA) and Singapore Youth Voices for Biodiversity (SYVB) has been strong in recent months and declining interest could be due to the presence of fewer environmental groups to generate interest for the cause, and fewer groups holding fewer events such as workshops and nature walks.
Environmental groups such as Climate Conversations, Ground Zero and Naked Hermit Crabs have either stopped or significantly reduced their activities. WWF, which bases its regional headquarters in Singapore, rarely campaigns on local issues in the city-state.
A study published by the Asean Studies Centre of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute on 3 April found that climate change is considered the second most pressing issue to Singaporeans, after intensifying geopolitical tensions.
Another study by the same institution in January that investigated the level of youth and civic engagement in Southeast Asia found that Singaporean respondents were “outliers”, with youths displaying a generally lower level of concern about multiple issues, compared to their regional counterparts in countries like Thailand and the Philippines.
S4F’s slowdown comes a month after the withdrawal of funding by United States Agency for International Development (USAID) hit non-governmental organisations in Asia Pacific following an executive order by United States President Donald Trump.
A study by Asia Philanthropy Circle, a non-profit, estimated that USAID funding cuts could mean losses of around US$275 million to non-profits working in Southeast Asia, and will consequently affect 3 million people in the region who would have been recipients of this aid.
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