KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia has earmarked 2.3 million hectares of forest for deforestation - an area larger than the size of Perak, Penang and Melaka combined and 100 times the size of Kuala Lumpur.
This, said environmentalists, could see the nation's forest cover decrease to less than 50 per cent.
Environmental group RimbaWatch, in a statement, estimated that Malaysia's forest cover could decrease to 15,636,737 ha, or 47 per cent of the total land area in the future.
This number is below Malaysia's commitment to maintain 50 per cent of its land as forest cover.
Rimbawatch, through its study titled "State of the Malaysian Rainforest 2023″, said it had collated and analysed data on past and potential future deforestation, and concluded that Malaysia had deforested 349,244 ha between 2017 to 2021.
Sarawak and Pahang, it said, experienced the highest rates of deforestation.
"The Federal Constitution provides that land and land management are entirely a state matter, meaning that there is limited opportunity for the federal government to enforce a 50 per cent forest cover policy or align states onto a pathway to end deforestation, even if they had the intention to do so.
"With reference to this, there appears to be no centralised monitoring of projected deforestation, which indicates that despite the fact that we have adopted a commitment to maintain forest cover at 50 per cent, there has been no proactive monitoring to ensure that this percentage is retained, and that we are not "locked-into" future deforestation," it said.
The group added that the biggest driver of deforestation for the 2017 to 2021 period was timber plantations, accounting for 41.6 per cent of deforestation, followed by palm oil which was responsible for 15.5 per cent.
"We identified 438 potential future deforestation alerts through 5 categories - zoning of forested land for non-forest usage, real estate listings of forested land, forest reserve degazettement, approved forest-risk environmental impact assessments and miscellaneous data.
"This results in our estimation that Malaysia could suffer a further 2,346,601 ha of deforestation in the future, an area 100 times the size of Kuala Lumpur and is larger than the size of Perak, Penang and Melaka combined," it said, adding that if it was a state of its own, it would be Malaysia's fourth largest state after Pahang.
It added that the projected top driver of future deforestation are timber plantations as these "forest plantations" programmes actually involve the deforestation and conversion of forest reserve lands into industrial monoculture plantations for commodities such as rubber and acacia.
The area at-risk from these programmes totals 1,794,887 hectares.
The group had also identified a number of regulatory, social and environmental issues which included fatalities potentially linked to deforestation, forest reserves and indigenous lands being sold openly on the internet.
These also included large-scale deforestation occurring without environmental impact assessments, projects ignoring environmentally-sensitive area designations, non-transparency of information, state-sanctioned intimidation of activists, inadequacy of certification frameworks, among others.
Moving forward, it suggested for the government to place a legally-binding moratorium on all forest clearing until issues could be addressed, to gazette all indigenous customary territories and abolish all timber plantation programmes and ensure 30 per cent of total land area are in totally protected forest areas.
"The private sector is urged to accept that deforestation and sustainability are mutually exclusive, and to reject any involvement in activities involving deforestation and violations of community rights," it said.