IPOH: An environmental group has warned that the state may face a serious water shortage if it continued to indiscriminately degazette land in water catchment areas for timber production.
Sahabat Alam Malaysia field officer Meor Razak Meor Abdul Rahman said studies conducted by the group found that over the years, some 10,000ha of forests had been de-gazetted in Perak.
“Between 2009 and 2012, 8,604.88ha of forests were de-gazetted. The figure has since grown.
“The clear-cutting method is employed to harvest the timber, and this will have a grave impact on the environment in the future,” he said.
Clear-cutting is a logging practice in which most or all trees in an area are uniformly felled.
As an example, he cited the Ijok Forest Reserve in Selama, which was identified as one of the state’s 23 water catchment areas and gazetted as a forest reserve in 2007.
“However, it was degazetted last year for timber production,” he said.
Meor said the mud floods that had hit villages in Kampar in June showed how the balance of nature had been upset.
“It is all due to the indiscriminate logging at the Bujang Melaka forest reserve in Kampar,” he said.
Meor said not every logging company obeyed the mandate to replant a tree for every one removed.
“The government must push for sustainable logging.”
Meor also expressed concern over the latest tactics employed by illegal loggers to avoid detection.
“We found at least two spots in the Tanjung Hantu and Beluka Semang forest reserves where illegal loggers had been at work.
“To avoid detection, they only cut down timber growing deep in the forest, away from the public eye.
“They will leave a layer of timber to camouflage their misdeeds from the authorities.”
He said both sites of illegal logging were the size of football fields. By Sylvia Looi