Singapore's LUSH Programme — Mandatory Greenery Replacement Turns Building Footprints into 40+ Hectares of Skyrise Green Space

As Singapore intensified land use with taller, denser buildings, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) introduced the Landscaping for Urban Spaces and High-Rises (LUSH) programme in 2009 to keep greenery pervasive and accessible, initially as a voluntary incentive scheme layered onto planning approvals.
Since LUSH 2.0 in 2014, developments in identified strategic areas — later expanded citywide — must replace, at minimum, the greenery displaced by their building footprint through Landscape Replacement Areas: green roofs, sky terraces, planter decks and vertical greenery systems. LUSH 3.0, introduced in 2017, further allowed rooftop urban farms to count for up to 10% of that mandatory replacement area.
URA reports the programme has added more than 40 hectares of green space across the city, with roughly two in three new residential developments and one in two new commercial, office and hotel developments voluntarily taking up a LUSH incentive on top of the mandatory replacement requirement. An independent policy analysis by the National University of Singapore's Energy Studies Institute credits Singapore's cumulative urban-greenery policies, including LUSH, with measurable contributions to lowering surface and air temperatures in the built environment, while also noting that isolating LUSH's standalone cooling contribution from other greenery schemes remains methodologically difficult.

Read the full analysis: https://www.ura.gov.sg/Corporate/Guidelines/Circulars/dc17-06