A Malaysian state is moving to protect its forested areas and ensure their safety.
According to The Vibes, Sabah has passed legislation that makes it mandatory to secure a license before engaging in any “forest carbon activity” on certain types of lands.
Because Sabah is a heavily forested region, its natural resources are a popular target for investing in carbon credits, which are used by companies to offset their production of planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide. Companies can invest in the forests’ capturing carbon in Sabah at an equal rate to the amount of pollution they produce.
The new law will allow Sabah to inventory, regulate, and monitor all trade of carbon credits while also ensuring it continues to benefit from the sale and trade of the credits between companies.
“The amendment gives us the legal basis to regulate carbon credit activities, ahead of the federal law on the same subject expected later this year. It’s important we act now to safeguard the state assets,” assistant minister in the chief minister’s department Datuk Abidin Madingkir said, per The Vibes.
Carbon offsets and carbon credits remain a controversial way to address our changing climate. While popular with corporations, the practice is often exploitative of Indigenous and local peoples and can result in their forcible removal from land — as CarbonBrief has detailed. They can also exaggerate their positive impact and reduce biodiversity with the planting of mass quantities of singular types of trees, for example. They can heavily restrict the use of land by Native peoples and can lead to money trading hands without the community ever getting a penny.
Sabah has drawn scrutiny before for its dealings with regard to carbon credits. In 2021, the United Nations started investigating Sabah for an agreement with a Singaporean company for the rights to over half the state’s forested land to be used as a carbon sink. The U.N. expressed concerns that the Indigenous people of Sabah, who account for more than half the state’s population, were not adequately informed of the impact the sale would have on them, as Mongabay reported.
That deal was eventually canceled by Malaysia’s top federal attorney, who declared the project to be unfeasible and lacking in transparency.
Madingkir said that the new bill allowed protection for the rights of Indigenous people, and that planting trees was permitted without license, as long as those trees weren’t being claimed as part of a carbon credit program, according to The Vibes. It will allow a chief conservator to close parts of the forest as well and regulate forest carbon standards that can be linked to federal and international databases to ensure transparency.
While carbon offsets in the region have been the subject of much scrutiny, Sabah appears to be trying to ensure the practice is done safely and responsibly while making sure that some of the money involved stays in the region.
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“This is the right time to enact a specific law to regulate forest carbon activities to protect the state’s interest and the sustainability of our forest resources,” Madingkir said, per The Vibes.
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