March 2025

04/13/25

March started off beautiful but ended off in an unexpected nightmare. 

I had the opportunity to fly to Hong Kong at the end of the month to attend the One Earth Summit 2025. It was a great platform for me to interact with Youths from ASEAN, Hong Kong SAR, and Mainland China. It is almost rare to have such collision of Eastern with the Southeast Asian perspectives. What I took away the most is for sure the connections that I have made from the Summit. This is one of the most diverse bunch of attendees, with highly ambitious and successful (I would say) individuals that are pretty much best-in-class in what they do in their own field. You can observe the sheer diligence and strength to continue what they are doing in some of them and that inspires me. I took the chance to meet up with one of our clients and developers - one that I would call my senior. I deeply respect the work that he does and what he stands for. I hope that one day I could embody the spirit of collaboration and "making things work".

The political instability and regulatory uncertainty sitting in some Asian countries have truly killed me. This risk stabbed me continuously - no break. I could point my fingers at anything but nothing at all. In hindsight, March is nothing as compared to April. I absolutely detest April already.

I realised how much life has been testing me lately. It has been throwing me lemons throughout since the start of the year until now. The degree of sadness I have been experiencing has reached rock bottom. But, it was when I realised that there is indeed hell below rock bottom - just when you though the lowest low couldn't get lower, it did.

Watching my team shrink to nothingness. Rebuilding the team, only to watch it all fall apart again. Holding on to fond memories of the brilliant soul I work closely with. Struggling with the miscellaneous projects that were left behind. All while maintaining my professionalism and exhibiting what I deem as the highest standards of advisory, in line or against the tides. Up-keeping my duties as a daughter, a role model to my brother, a strong pillar of support to my sister who is getting through her own transition. Keeping up with the progress and expansion of my start-up without loosening too much. Deep-seated struggles in crafting out what LSEA and creating something that would be relevant and helpful to these Youth Organizations. Not meeting expectations of clients/developers whom I have built strong ties with. Strong feeling of embarrassment and the shame that comes with the change in Group strategy. Burdened emotions of not being able to secure additional funding and off-take for WP.

I feel so emotionally burdened but am so seated at my own life drama. Like bring me my own set of popcorn and coke zero please.

Anyways, life sucks and I just need to be more resilient, to be a bit tougher than yesterday, and try to figure out my plan next and a strategy for every single piece of the pie. I just need to be clear about what I think is purposeful and the time and effort spent will be worth the beauty at the end.

I was excited for 2025, overly excited actually (in hindsight). But 4 months in, I think I need to re-evaluate lol.

I need an overdose of dopamine to get through the month of April, after being absolutely slayed by March.

Hui

February 2025

03/16/25

TLDR: A month full of celebrations and rushing for client deadlines, with occasional pockets of time to reconnect with old friends.

This month started with our annual Chinese New Year celebrations. This year was special because this was my first time giving my parents a red packet each, since I am finally working full-time. My family gathered for our annual hotpot reunion dinner during the eve. I took a night walk after a stomach-filling dinner (let's just say I really needed to walk off the calories gained). I called up my JC senior to join me in my walk. I have been meaning to catch-up with her. It has been roughly ~2 years since I last met her. We took a long ~3km walk around our neighbourhood and she shared with me her life as a nurse, her daily routine, her ambitions and aspirations to work as a nurse overseas. It was this conversation that reminded me that everyone has different sources of happiness and different definitions of work. For instance, I feel fulfilled, hence happy at work when I can value-add to my Client and advise them on their problems. But, she feels happy when she has time off-work to do what she wants. For context, she experienced ~1 year of constant OT-ing in a different department - the fast-paced life and extremely tight daily routine motivated her to change department. She craved for time that she could set aside for herself, though she loves her team so dearly. I think it is difficult sometimes to put ourselves first and I am really glad she did. I am still proud of her journey and how far she has come, especially her sacrifices as a front-line healthcare worker.

I started on a new project this month and it was an extremely demanding project. But it was this project that awakened my dormant business acumen. I did not realise how much I missed building businesses, growing businesses, and running analyses to support strategic decisions. It was precisely because of how challenging the client was, I managed to learn a lot from them and it became a mutual learning and sharing knowledge space. With tightened relationship also comes with greater expectation to need to deliver even better quality work. This project was a short-sprint of ~1.5 months and by now (mid-March), it has ended. I tried my best and I think that's all that matters. I hope I would have more opportunities to develop the commercial side of me further. 

Let's see what's next.

Rookie for Life,
Hui

January 2025

01/30/25

TLDR: A month filled with new lessons and beginnings. I started working with a new team at work and started adapting to their new ways of working. I had multiple gatherings with friends to catch-up on their lives and to reconnect with my life in Singapore.

This month started off the year at a high note. I kick-started the month with a meaningful conference (7 - 8 Jan): Investments into Forestry & Biodiversity Summit, hosted by CE-EM. It was a moment to take in when I saw my school mates at the conference. It dawned on me that all of us are moving on to another phase of our lives together. It was a bittersweet realisation. Besides that, I had a lot of takeaways from this conference and I had some time to share some of my findings during our team's weekly meeting. Some of them are as below. And my own personal opinion in one-liner? Generally, not enough spotlight on diverse conservation funding models, which is misleading.

1. Massive challenge surrounding securing long-term land ownership or leases for long-term forestry contracts, where benefit-sharing does not seem to satisfy the aboriginal owners of the land
2. Both additionality and permanence remains as clear struggles of the forestry carbon business as short-medium term carbon storage is what defines forestry business and additionality for carbon projects should go beyond emission reductions but also include co-benefits such as improving the livelihood of the vulnerable communities
3. An emerging convergence of social impact assessment concepts (e.g., theory of change) becomes an increasingly important cornerstone of any forestry carbon projects – stemming from the understanding that the commitment from local communities will ensure project longevity and integrity
4. The role of insurance companies is increasingly more defined: as a market player - providing insurance coverage for carbon projects or as a project beneficiary - providing revenue flows for carbon projects diverted from project premiums
5. Contentious point on making biodiversity credits tradeable is an external reflection of a market power play versus the intrinsic value of biodiversity
6. Biodiversity credits market is positioned as a scalable mechanism that could be suited to close up the short-term conservation funding gap
7. Clear trend of forestry business owners in SEA actively considering a business transformation to diversify their portfolio to include carbon credits generation from forestry (incl. ARR, IFM)
8. Forestry-related carbon credits could be isolated from global standards and frameworks including Article 6.4 methodologies and CORSIA – hence, there is still a strong consensus for the need of VCM; there is clear displeasure from project developers on the diverging methodologies and is calling for standardisation instead
9. Blue carbon projects face significant operational hurdles at the onset, but thereafter the challenges are significantly reduced as the local communities become more experienced with managing mangroves and knowing what works (i.e., reduction in OPEX costs is expected

I had ~4 gatherings with friends this month, roughly once per week. It is pretty surreal to think that I was just in BKK in the entire month of December. And before I realised, I am back in Singapore - as though nothing has changed since I left. My Thai friend, P'Namwaa, came to Singapore for a visit and I caught up with her over dinner at Pasir Panjang Hawker Centre and sent her to the airport afterwards. We had a conversation on how volatile the political environment is and how it feels like sustainability professionals like ourselves would lose our relevance anytime. Truth be told, doing the work that I am doing is a dream come true.  The issue is really the fact that we are in pursuit of a greater good that is seemingly worthless to certain groups of the global population. But who is to blame when everyone is living different realities and have different perspectives of what is ultimately important to them? Who am I to say that what I hope for the world is more important than another girl in the United States who needs cheaper electricity just to get by. The energy trilemma is as real as it gets. Ultimately, the long-term upsides will always be blindsided by the short-term downsides. All of us are just trying to get by, fighting for something that means something or anything to us. 

With that being said, it is true that I do need to be able to build a sustainable niche in sustainability. And I need to figure this out somehow. If I take Ms RY as an example, she cares so deeply for the world and the impact of her portfolio on the environment and communities, but she still needs to manage the day-to-day demands of her work. I am sure it is difficult for her to strike that balance between realism and idealism, but it is fascinating how she navigates it. Question is always how to integrate and build a business that matters and lasts. She is an inspiration for me. To be honest, infrastructure investment and designing business models fascinate me. That is one area of work that I would love to explore more further in the future.

Your life, Hui, no one else.