The Penang South Reclamation Scheme looks good on paper … at least to local politicians and developers. It would be a massive overhaul of the fast-developing island’s southern shoreline complete with the construction of two new artificial islands off the coast (of about 2,000 acres and 1,300 acres respectively) with…
Two sun bears and a Malayan tapir. Three endangered animals perished on Malaysian roads in as many days over the Christmas holidays. Time for a sigh of “not again!” Indeed. On December 22 a tapir was run down and killed on the Jalan Seremban-Kuala Pilah road. A group of men…
The oriental blue clearwing, a moth that looks and acts like a bee, was last seen in the 19th century and believed to have long gone extinct. It turns out, though, that the blue-and-white species of clearwing moth, known scientifically as Heterosphecia tawonoides, is alive and well in Malaysia. The…
More than 35,000. That’s how many Sunda pangolins are known to have been lost to poaching and wildlife trafficking within a few short years in neighboring Indonesia. Shocking? You bet. According to a new study by the wildlife-monitoring watchdog TRAFFIC, as many as 35,632 pangolins were seized in 111 enforcement…
Pretty much wherever you look around the planet, wildernesses are shrinking. Well, not everywhere, to be sure, but in places like Borneo forests have shrunk drastically over the past decades. And that is, needless to say, a problem not only for Malaysia but for the entire planet as well. “These…
If you think Penang, a small and overdeveloped island, has lost all of its biodiversity, think again. Malaysia’s most famous island continues to have a few surprises up its sleeve. A 117-strong international team of researchers from the California Academy of Sciences and The Habitat Penang Hill recently conducted a…
We love our smartphones and for good reason. They are handy little devices that can make life a whole lot easier. There is a bit of a problem, though: our devotion to our devices is harming the environment. There are billions of smartphones in use around the planet with millions…
In June Puntung, one of Malaysia’s last two female Sumatran rhinos, succumbed to an especially acute form of skin cancer. Conservationists and animal lovers alike lamented her passing. They took comfort in the fact that the other female rhino, Iman, remained relatively healthy and strong. This continued to kindle hope…
Pollution kills and debilitates. And of all forms of pollution, air pollution is perhaps the most insidious, for breathe air we must throughout our lives and if the air is polluted we have no choice but to breathe in all that invisible pollution along with the oxygen that we need…
Malaysia remains a global hub for wildlife traffickers. We’ve long known that, but here comes some further confirmation of it: wildlife authorities in the African nation of Zimbabwe intercepted 200kg of ivory that was on its way to Malaysia. The haul of illicit elephant tusks, which had been stashed in…
A half century ago there were still around 3,000 tigers in the wild around Malaysia. Today there may well be as few as 250 left, less than a tenth of that figure. And if we don’t do all we can to save the last few hundred tigers, there won’t be…
Come December 17, you can do something for the wild in Sarawak . . . in a hurry. The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Run for the Wild event this year will kick off on Sunday at the Swinburne University of Technology, Sarawak Campus, in Kuching. First launched in 2015, Run for…
Your boat or ship springs a leak and oil spills into the sea. What can you do? It’s not your fault. Right? Whether it’s your fault or not, you may well be responsible for even accidental oil spills if Natural Resources and Environment Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar has his…
Bornean pygmy elephants are facing existential threats in Sabah and so the death of any more wild elephants in the state is bad news. Yet just over the past few months several wild elephants have been shot dead by poachers or irate plantation workers. Now another wild elephant is dead….
The world’s first ever national inquiry into the responsibility of the fossil fuel industry for its negative impacts on human rights resulting from climate change is taking place today in the Philippines, just a single day after Human Rights Day on December 10. Leading oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP,…
Poachers and hunters, armed and dangerous as they frequently are, pose a threat not only to wildlife but to wildlife officials too. So what to do? The solution may lie in arming some wildlife rangers themselves so that they can defend wild animals and themselves alike more effectively against armed…