Contractor, supervisor get conditional warning over Lower Peirce Reservoir tree clearance: NParks

NParks in June said that it was investigating the unauthorised clearance of a site in Lower Peirce Reservoir, which contained trees planted under the OneMillionTrees movement, which aims to plant 1 million trees across Singapore from 2020 to 2030.

It said at the time that routine inspections found that around 40 saplings and shrubs within half of the original tree-planting site had been cleared without approval to store materials at the site.

The agency on Wednesday said the contractor was engaged to carry out cyclical replacement of the boardwalk at Lower Peirce Reservoir, and needed to identify a location that was near the trail entrance to store their materials.

Ms Kwok said that NParks had communicated to the site supervisor that the planting site proposed by the contractor was not suitable for storage space, adding that the agency had identified a suitable location for storage, “on the condition that no trees or plants would be affected”.

Its investigations showed that clearance of the saplings from an area of 40.5sqm in the 165.5sqm planting site was due to an error by the project supervisor who was covering the duties of the site supervisor on overseas leave.

“Although the site supervisor had communicated NParks’ directions to him, the project supervisor had misunderstood the instructions, and stored the materials at a site which NParks had earlier assessed to be not suitable,” Ms Kwok said.

She added that when NParks discovered the unauthorised clearance and checked with the contractor, the contractor and project supervisor admitted their error.

They also agreed to bear the cost of replanting and maintaining the cleared plot in Lower Peirce Reservoir.

NParks has replanted the affected area with 60 new plants, with species originally planted in 2025, as well as three new species – which are food plants for the Raffles Banded Langur and a variety of forest birds

The replanting was completed on Jun 9.