PETALING JAYA: Tighter vetting and enforcement are needed to tackle climate change that is causing natural disasters like the frequent floods occurring in the country, says the Academy of Sciences (ASM).
Council member Dr Helen Nair said the government should be stricter and insist that those in the construction sector show how their projects would not harm the environment.
“These companies must show that they have taken all the necessary measures to prevent any negative impact to the surroundings and also provide a guarantee that they will not harm the natural environment,” she said in an interview.
“This good management practice is already being carried out in Europe. We need to study and implement it in Malaysia.
She said the country was facing increasingly bad floods because of uncontrolled logging and development.
She said there should be proper planning to ensure there were channels for the water to flow through so that the rain would not affect the people and the environment.
Helen, who is an ASM fellow for the biological, agricultural and environmental sciences, said the government and companies need to be thinking not just of their “return on investment but also their return on value”.
“When land is cleared, there are no more vegetation and trees that act as guards or blocks to hold back the water,” she said.
She added that Malaysia had enough policies to tackle the climate crisis but what was lacking was enforcement.
“If these are strictly enforced, there would be proper planning and we could alleviate some of the present environmental problems,” she said.
In December and January, Malaysia experienced some of the worst flooding incidents in the country’s history due to the wet spell.
Devastating floods hit Johor, Melaka, Negri Sembilan, Pahang, Perak, Selangor, Terengganu, Sabah, Sarawak, Kuala Lumpur and Kelantan.
In parts of Kelantan, two papers for Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) scheduled for yesterday had to be postponed.
Just last month, a freak storm hit parts of Melaka, uprooting trees and damaging property which also saw more than 10 people evacuated from their homes.
At the end of January, a “mini tornado” – known as a landspout – formed in Lembah Kinta, Perak, destroying hundreds of homes just before Chinese New Year.
According to the 2021 Special Report on Impact of Floods, Selangor, Pahang and Melaka suffered the highest losses nationwide, while the recently published ASM Science Outlook 2020 report cited flooding as the most common natural disaster in the country, followed by storms and landslides.
Among the key interventions listed in the ASM report are strengthening effective governance and institutional arrangements by regular reviews of policy targets and legislation for climate change in Malaysia.
It also suggested enhancing the state of preparedness and increasing resilience to environmental disasters by harnessing scientific research, planning, and climate engineering and modelling.
Malaysia must put in place measures to address the climate crisis and implement strategies to protect the people and its natural capital, said the report.