Malaysia’s getting hotter. Can its leaders rise to the climate challenge?
- Some Malaysian cities have recorded temperature rises of up to 6.7 degrees Celsius over the past two decades
- But with a leadership focused on retaining power and battling the coronavirus, there’s a danger climate change will take a back seat
Urban regeneration organisation ThinkCity has warned of the adverse effects of climate change and unchecked urban expansion on liveability in Malaysian cities such as Ipoh, where it found in a recent study that average temperatures had risen by an eye-popping 6.75 degrees Celsius between 1998 and 2019. The ThinkCity study that mapped land surface temperature found a similar increase of 6.7 degrees in Johor Bahur between 2005 and 2018.
Such drastic increases in temperature threaten the health of both humans and wildlife, and have spurred ThinkCity Managing Director Hamdan Abdul Majeed to urge all sectors of Malaysia’s economy to join the fight against climate change.
Yet despite Malaysia announcing a National Climate Change Policy in 2009 and signing a host of international agreements such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol – as well as implementing domestic policies such as the Green Technology Master Plan and the National Energy Efficiency Action Plan – little headway has been made towards a more eco-friendly future.
Darshan Joshi, an analyst with Malaysia’s Institute of Strategic and International Studies, said the country’s climate change policy was in sore need of updating “given the magnitude of change … including within the renewable energy sector and the climate finance ecosystem” since it was first introduced more than a decade ago.
