Professor Winston Chow, 40, assistant professor
THE GUY EDUCATING US ON CLIMATE CHANGE:
P rofessor Winston Chow is one of three Singapore-based academics selected by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to contribute in 2021 to an international report on climate change.
From heatwaves to rising sea levels, the issue is very real and could overwhelm Singapore. So for the next two years, Prof Chow will be ploughing through scientific literature and policy papers. His authorship will focus on East and South-east Asian coastal cities. The challenge is to distil all the information into a very short chapter and advise government officials on what has been done and what can be done.
“For instance, Singapore will be implementing a carbon tax this year. A decision partly made due to the results of previous reports, it’s to help stimulate investment in renewable energy,” he explains.
In the National University of Singapore assistant professor’s chapter, he’ll be the lead author in how cities, settlements and their key infrastructure are impacted by climate change. He was nominated by the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, which passed on his resume to the UN body.
His impetus, though, was more modest. “When we were growing up, my two brothers constantly asked why Singapore was so hot. Whether we were out for makan, playing football, or at the beach,” says Prof Chow, explaining that his childhood adventures were what initially sparked his interest in climate change.
He guest lectures at other universities, junior colleges and secondary schools to give teachers the latest updates on his work (to educate the next generations). He covers updates on how climate change affects our everyday lives, and sometimes includes big-picture information that can’t be gleaned from textbooks, such as what’s happening here in real time (our erratic rainfall patterns, for example).
The IPCC work is pro bono and timeconsuming. According to Prof Chow, the joke that academia takes up 24 hours a day couldn’t be more accurate. A lot of time is spent keeping up to date with scientific articles and policy papers, even if they’re not directly related to his area of research. But the father of two says: “My wife and I want our kids to know that their lives would be tremendously affected by climate change. And that at least I tried to make a difference at the level that I was asked to.”