We are in this capital desal plant. It looks wonderful because it has a good view of the city from here. But right below this beautiful open park is actually Singapore's fourth desalination plant. It has a capacity of 30 mgd and it's our way to build resilience to our water supply system because it allows us to tap the seawater desalination in case we need that water.
And also it allows us to switch. We can also treat reservoir fresh water, brackish water. So it has that added resilience for us to be adaptable to the environment as we need.
This is our way to integrate our infrastructure also to the environment, making it accessible to the public and offering the public a new place to go to. So I think in the Singapore story of sustainability, It's really incorporating our needs, whether it's water, whether it's energy, whether it's food, and looking at how we can build that in an integrated way to the development of the city, offering still a place for people to go to and family to enjoy, even though we are very land scarce. Access to clean, fresh water is one challenge that Singapore has overcome despite its lack of natural water resources. But water resilience is just one pillar of the country's sustainability journey.
This year, the Environment and Water Resources Ministry was renamed the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment to greater reflect the nation's priorities going forward. Ms Grace Foo, who helps the Ministry, tells us what this renaming means for Singapore. I think it means that we have to look at our water, our food, our waste in a more holistic way.
It's not just about preventing environmental pollution anymore, it's about looking at the resource. And how do we make full use of the resource and recycle it as much as we can? We have done so in water.
I think everybody is familiar with water reclamation and recycling now. We will do that for food, we will do that for other waste streams. Really it's about reusing our resources a lot more so that we can develop, enjoy the kind of economic development.
And yet... in a sustainable pace because all of us want to live a better life, we want to enjoy the better things in life, we want to travel, we want to own our iPhones, we want to use our computer, but at the same time we're depleting earth resources. So we need to find a way, a balance between human needs and also our draw on the earth. We would like to have that really integrated into all our ministries. Sustainability, is not just a vertical, it's also a horizontal layer that cuts across all ministries.
Whether you're an MOE, you build a school, you can build it in a sustainable way, use less energy, or you are in transportation, you can look at public transportation with more renewable energy, for example, through electrification, lower emission. So we want to have that discussion in the public service. We will come up with a framework to guide public service in this area, and we hope that we can work together, hold a government.
towards a more sustainable goal. Between 2012 and 2015, Ms Foo was second minister for the Environment and Water Resources. But the environmental sector has changed between then and now.
First of all, we have the food sector coming in. It wasn't before, it was actually in several ministries. There's some part in Health, there's some part in MND.
But when we brought together, it actually allowed us to look at this stream again from sort of beginning to end. We look at food supply, look at resilience, security, and also look at safety as we move into hygiene. Look at retail and F&B, looking at food safety in a more holistic way, and also look at how to treat the waste.
And I think that sort of signifies how we are thinking now in MSE. All the streams that we are working on, whether it's food, whether it's waste, whether it's water, energy, we're looking at looping it. We're looking at how to make a more sustainable use of the resource under us. Obviously, I think in the last few years, the movement towards sustainable development, it's actually, you know, the momentum has increased partly because of global action, partly also because the investors, the fund managers, the corporates themselves are beginning to realise that they cannot develop in an unsustainable way anymore because that's bad for business. So I think there's a great movement towards disclosure, towards reporting and now we see this.
drive towards transitioning to a low-carbon future. And that has a great impact because not only are the companies themselves doing so, it adds on as a competitive advantage for companies that can do that well. And also some companies are demanding downstream from their supplier, from their service provider, that they too need to provide sustainable green products and services. So I think that this is a ripple effect that we are seeing and we're very encouraged by that and we want to see how we can help the corporates working with NGOs, working with the people sector, the community. to drive that change in behaviour that we need.
Singapore's focus on sustainability is not new, but there are lessons to dealing with climate change that the country could draw on from the COVID-19 pandemic. I think it has taught us a few things. I think we need to, first of all, have that resilience for resource. We have seen how supply disruptions have affected us in food, in many of the products that we're producing.
We thought that we can import easily, we have large logistical capability, but when there's disruptions, and disruptions caused one feedstock to affect another, assembly became chaotic because the parts were not coming together. And this is really a sign of what global disruptions mean, and I think we should really think about how to make ourselves a lot more resilient. So in the area of food for example, we see that with climate change there could be sort of large shortages across a whole sector and therefore we need to build up that resilience and have that local production capability.
Because while diversification of sources can reduce the risk of disruption from individual countries, but local production capability will allow us to really be more resilient. against system-wide breakdown. So that's one. The second area, important area, is to look at how we can be more economically resilient. So in other words, how do we continue to have activities even as we have safe distancing measurements, for example.
Again, allowing us to switch very quickly through digital means, responding very quickly. including how do we ensure that our place of work is clean, disinfected, and that we have good hygiene habits across the whole society, from where we eat in the hawker centre to where we work, to really ensure that we are able to overcome some of this pandemic in the future.