Still green: Malaysia’s forest cover remains at a little over 50% of its land area. — Photos: Filepic/The Star
DESPITE the availability of high-resolution satellite imagery, the protection of Malaysian forests cannot be effective without having “boots on the ground”, says Natural Resources, Environment and Climate Change Minister Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad.
While satellite imagery might give us an overall picture of the state of our forests, we need community rangers, as they are collectively called, to have their eyes and ears close to the ground to monitor and curb wildlife poaching and illegal forest clearing.
Recognising the importance of these rangers – comprising jungle experts from the ranks of retired armed and police forces as well as Orang Asli communities – Budget 2023 increased funding for them, says Nik Nazmi in an exclusive interview with Sunday Star on Friday.
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The news of wild elephant herds encroaching on settlements or monkeys coming into conflict with humans tends to grab attention but it’s what happens deep in the jungle that needs the attention of rangers.
“Poachers that go after tigers, for example, were not being attended to until we increased the number of community rangers. That has had a big impact on conservation, not just of flora but also the fauna inside the forest,” says Nik Nazmi.
Nik Nazmi: ’It is increasingly recognised that the forest ecosystem provides important support in socioeconomic and cultural life, in line with the idea of forests beyond timber.’
Paying to stay green
Another aspect of conservation that doesn’t get as much attention as high-tech satellites, perhaps, is financial incentives.
Malaysia is a federation of states – something that most people need to be reminded of – so land and land use are state matters, and something that’s zealously guarded. So for the Federal Government to get buy-in from the states in conserving forests, it needs to pay states not to clear forests for commercial purposes.
Since 2019, the Federal Government has employed another tried-and-tested mechanism to do this: fund transfers to incentivise states to protect their forests.
The biodiversity protection mechanism called the Ecological Fiscal Transfer (EFT) has been around since the early 1990s under the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); it is, basically, a mechanism to distribute “a share of revenues according to where environment is protected” according to the UNDP.
The most recent round of top recipients of the EFT are Sabah, which received RM16mil in Budget 2023; followed by Pahang, RM14mil; Terengganu RM13.9mil; Perak RM13mil; Kelantan RM11mil; and Sarawak RM10mil. Collectively, these six states took up nearly RM80mil, which is more than half of the RM150mil in EFT funds set aside in 2023.
“Practically, every state gets the EFT, including Penang,” says Nik Nazmi.
However, he explains that EFTs can never fully compensate each state for their agreement to leave parts of their forest cover untouched by development; at best, EFTs serve as incentives. In Malaysia, EFT is a formal environmental grant-making system, with the amount to be disbursed varying according to how a state “scores” on an ecological criteria checklist.
“We announce each year how much we’re giving, and the states are all assessed by NRECC and MOF, among others, where we evaluate them based on the size of the protected areas as their ecological score, as well as how well they protect their forests,” says Nik Nazmi referring to the Natural Resources, Environment and Climate Change Ministry and the Finance Ministry.
“How the EFT funds are to be spent is also prescribed, and it has to be on areas related to conservation, enforcement, or public awareness – it must all be related to forest conservation. It’s not like it [the money] just goes into the account and it gets spent on roads or for other things. It has to be specific and related to forests,” he says.
On overall balance, says the minister, the EFT scheme is a helpful counter to the pressure that the states face to exploit their forests because they are always tempted to take the short way out, which is just by selling timber or the land for plantations and other forms of commercial development.
That said, much work remains to be done to account for every ringgit given through the EFT scheme, and this is highly dependent on effective data collection, monitoring, and evaluation systems.
From the experience gleaned from other countries that embarked on EFT schemes much earlier than Malaysia, the funds should be paid based on ecological indicators, and this could go beyond the government’s existing data gathering capabilities.
This may call for additional efforts to set up robust indicators related to environmental quality such as carbon emissions along with air and water quality measurements.
Rigorous reporting
Malaysia’s forest cover in 2020 stood close to 55% – or 18.05 million hectares – of the country’s total land area. From this, about 10.68 million hectares have been designated as permanent forest reserves. This amount of tree cover is slightly more than the country’s initial commitment made at the watershed Earth Summit 1992, where we pledged to maintain the figure at no lower than 50%.
“The good news is that there’s hardly any deforestation from plantations, and that’s one of the positive developments that we’ve seen in recent years,” says Nik Nazmi.
Reporting on the inventory of Malaysia’s forested areas uses protocols from the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation framework under the Biennial Update Report to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; we also use the Global Forest Resources Assessment protocol under the Food and Agricultural Organisation as part of the United Nations Forum on Forests.
Nik Nazmi reveals that, based on the Forest Resources Assessment 2020 Report, Malaysia is among 25 developing countries that have high forest cover and low deforestation activities, with our deforestation rate below the global average.
All this reporting requires rigorous methodology, which is where Malaysia turns to those satellite images for aerial monitoring, while on-the-ground monitoring is also conducted.
“Generally, the total forest area is obtained from legal gazettement notifications and geospatial maps. Therefore, the difference in data generated by satellite analysis and official data is contributed by different methodologies used, with satellite data sometimes giving an inaccurate picture as it may include agricultural land and plantations outside the permanent forest reserve, or [privately] owned land areas, municipal areas, and count it all as tree cover areas,” explains Nik Nazmi.
In the short term, the Malaysian Space Agency and all state Forestry Departments have developed a monitoring system to check illegal land clearing. It relies on our SPOT 5, SPOT 6, and SPOT 7 satellites along with drone footage to identify changes and perform mapping.
However, for long-term monitoring, a National Forest Inven-tory is undertaken every 10 years. Currently, Malaysia is in the process of conducting the National Forest Inventory Six (2021-2024), Forest Inventory of Sabah (2019-2023), and the Sarawak Forest Resource Inventory (2021-2025), says the minister, adding that it is only after verification that such data can be released as official Malaysian data.
On his ministry’s part, the latest data on national forest cover will be released in the near future following the conclusion of the National Biodiversity Council meeting in March.
Areas that meet the definition of forests, or tree cover, must be a least 0.5ha, with trees higher than 5m, and a canopy cover of more than 30%, or trees able to reach these thresholds as they are in situ, according to the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020 Report, which adds that land that is predominantly under agriculture or urban land use is excluded.
In Malaysia’s case, for a more consistent treatment, Malaysia follows its National Land Code definition, where areas gazetted by state governments as forest and subjected to the National Forestry Act, will be considered as forest cover.
The definition also excludes tree stands in agricultural production systems such as fruit plantations, oil palm plantations, and agroforestry systems where crops are grown under tree cover.
Looking beyond timber
The traditional view of managing forest resources only for timber production and plantation or agricultural use must change with the times.
“It is increasingly recognised that the forest ecosystem provides important support in socioeconomic and cultural life, in line with the idea of forests beyond timber,” says Nik Nazmi.
“Therefore, the government has been giving attention to the social aspects of forestry development. Poverty, whether relative or absolute, continues to plague forest- dependent indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs).
“Currently, social forestry practices have been expanded to other activities such as rehabilitation of coastal areas, ecotourism and recreational parks, establishment of nurseries, as well as education programmes to raise awareness among IPLCs [of the value of intact ecosystems].
“These initiatives aim to uplift livelihoods, improve the productivity of degraded land and forest cover, and raise the public’s awareness about the importance of conserving biodiversity, in line with the government’s focus on continuing to uplift living standards of these communities which are also part of the B40 group in Malaysia,” says Nik Nazmi.
The minister says that addressing the societal dimension of conservation will be an important part in the overall plan to protect our forests and threatened fauna, such as the Malayan tiger.
“These initiatives incorporate a whole-of-society approach as well as recognise the important roles of non-governmental actors, including indigenous peoples and local communities,” says Nik Nazmi.
