Malaysia has fairly strong environmental laws that prescribe harsh penalties for wildlife trafficking and other nefarious crimes against the environment. Yet these activities, including wildlife trafficking, continue to persist around the nation. Why is that? For one thing, laws are routinely left unenforced and culprits are let off the hook…

Forestry officials are our eyes in forests. They are tasked with keeping an eye on logging to ensure that no illegal activity takes places in the country’s much-depleted forests. But what happens when the eyes of these officials are willfully blind to such logging? What happens is this: loggers can…

Despite the efforts of the authorities to clamp down on the practice, illegal logging is going on unabated in Malaysia’s forests. Few loggers end up facing serious consequences for breaking the law. For one thing, few of them are even caught. For another, even those that are caught may escape…

Corruption is a blight on the environment. It undermines rule of law, aids a culture of impunity and corrodes trust in the authorities. Malaysia is a country with high levels of endemic corruption so it’s no surprise that it is also facing a variety of acute environmental problems. But there’s always…

Wildlife crimes and corruption routinely go hand in hand. For starters, without certain officials willing to turn a blind eye to rampant trafficking (for kickbacks and other rewards), traffickers would have a much harder time. But the problem can go much deeper than that. A pervasive culture of bribery, money laundering and institutionalized…

A lesson from the recent bauxite mining fiasco in Pahang, which has inflicted massive damage on the local environment, has been this: local politicians and authorities cannot be trusted to have nature’s and local people’s best interests in mind. They are supposed to be in charge, and yet when push…