Singapore's sustainability minister Grace Fu told the Asia New Vision Forum Innovation Summit that governments and businesses should stop treating historical weather records as a reliable guide for future climate planning. Her point: past patterns no longer hold as the climate shifts, so infrastructure, water management, and disaster readiness need forward-looking scenarios, not backward-looking averages. The warning matters beyond Singapore. Cities and companies still use historical return periods for flood defenses, grid design, and insurance pricing. If those baselines are stale, the risk is underbuilt infrastructure and underpriced exposure. The article is paywalled after the opening remarks, but the core message is clear enough: planning based on what happened before is now a liability.
