Why Malaysia is squandering its greatest natural wealth

Chandran Nair

Recently, I returned from two weeks in West Asia to a wet Kuala Lumpur.

I have rarely felt so lucky and blessed to be home. Why? We have access to a lush life, which so many in different parts of the world, like West Asia, simply cannot imagine.

During my trip, I was finishing a meal when a Saudi princess gestured towards my half-finished glass of water. “You should finish that.”  

The message was clear: “Water is precious here, and we don’t waste a drop.” It was a thoroughly embarrassing but important wake-up call to those of us who take its abundance and the lushness it sustains at home for granted.

It was a simple comment, unadorned and practical. Yet it lingered. In a region where the horizon trembles with heat, mirages are part of the view, and the air can taste of dryness and sand, water is not a casual thing.

Every sip carries history. It is collected, stored, rationed and never wasted. Even in wealth, its scarcity defines everything, shapes the way people live; their rhythms, their restraint, their quiet respect for what sustains life.

Back home, travelling from the airport, the taxi window framed a blur of palms, bougainvillea and rain-heavy trees. A storm had passed earlier, and water still ran in small rivers along the road’s edge.

The landscape was dense, alive with animals and insects, nurturing and forgiving, and yet unforgiving in its lushness. A lushness that so many of us not only ignore but even see as a nuisance to our urban sanitised lives.

After the muted glare of the desert, it felt like stepping into another planet – a paradise. One that we take for granted.

And yet, as the city came into view – the towers, its roads, its construction cranes – it was clear how little this lushness meant to so many as we hunger for more meaningless development.

The rain had stopped but drains overflowed with litter – the ubiquitous fingerprint of modern life. Rivers carried the waste of our ways including soil from destructive development practices. Many roadside trees were cut to stumps, even though new ones were being planted in ugly municipal fashion. Concrete had advanced into every margin as if every square metre of cement and tar translated directly into a unit of gross domestic product (GDP).

The air smelt green, but the city behaved as if greenery was on notice, cheaply expendable and a nuisance to be tolerated or gentrified into manufactured prettiness.

It became so clear we live surrounded by abundance, yet treat it like clutter or obstacles to our endless search for a sanitised progress.

The lush life we no longer see

For those of us who live in Malaysia’s cities, greenery has become a kind of wallpaper in our busy lives. It frames our roads, shades our parks, filters our air, softens the harshness of urban living. Yet we rarely stop to notice it, let alone understand it.

Our geography is a privilege disguised as normality. Malaysia sits within a narrow equatorial belt, where rain falls with metronomic consistency. Rain falls predictably.

Soil regenerates. Vegetation grows without asking.

The environment seems so forgiving that neglect feels inconsequential, but the long -term consequences are already converging on us.

How much destruction is enough? In urban Malaysia and other parts too, nature is treated as an inconvenience, something to trim or remove when it gets in the way of the relentless march of Homo economicus.

Trees and other natural habitats are plundered and erased for all sorts of developments, road widening and even for the odd reasoning of improving landscaping. Natural undergrowth is cleared because it looks untidy.

Buffer zones between transport networks are ‘cleaned up’ and trees removed leaving bare, ugly landscapes. Birds, bees and even frogs are culled for being nuisances.

All animals are seen as pests rather than part of the ecosystem that needs to be protected even within an urban setting. Poisonous chemicals are also used in this assault.

The pattern is casual, but the consequence is cumulative. Each act of removal erases a small piece of resilience and creates new threats.

City authorities act like watchdogs, but ignore our tropical reality. Their bureaucracies can’t handle the onslaught and are at times complicit in it.

Their language is managerial, their actions not guided by deep knowledge but are instead reactive.

A branch falls in a storm, and entire rows of trees are pruned beyond recognition. A few well-placed complaints from wealthy residents, afraid of falling leaves, creeping branches or the simple presence of wildlife are enough to bring down healthy, mature trees.

Coconut palms are branded hazards to cars in residential estates, even when those cars are illegally parked, while the illegality is overlooked.

This habit of culling has become institutional but not guided by the necessary expertise needed to manage a city blessed with the lush bounty of nature.

The need for expertise is dire given that climate change will also create new challenges for managing urban greenery given the conflicting needs. Storms will be stronger and urban temperatures will rise. Trees will be needed.

A few days in Riyadh made this crystal clear. Hardly anyone walks from 08:00 to 19:00 due to the intense heat and the absence of large-scale shade. Singapore is taking groundbreaking steps to deal with these dual challenges as part of its “City in Nature” strategy.

Meanwhile, in Kuala Lumpur, we see the gap. The city employs a meagre 21 certified arborists to manage hundreds of thousands of trees. Across the country, there are only about 150 in total. Singapore, much smaller in land and population, has almost four times that number.

Between 2012 and 2014, major Malaysian cities lost hundreds of hectares of tree cover. Penang lost 138 hectares. Johor Bahru lost more than 600. Pasir Gudang lost over a thousand.

These numbers describe not just deforestation but an attitude: a bureaucratic impatience with the living world, something which must be tamed for human habitation, economic growth, convenience and indulgences.

Machinery of lushness and our irrational fear of it

The tropical green that surrounds us operates with precision. Each tree, shrub and insect performs work that sustains the others and us.

Rain feeds the soil, roots hold it together, and leaves return moisture to the air. All parts of a tree play a critical role in the carbon cycle, not to mention releasing oxygen and cleaning the air.

Ants, beetles, worms and termites aerate the ground and break down organic matter to rejuvenate the soil. Bees pollinate. Birds scatter seeds, sing for us and even remove other insects which humans consider pests. Bats do the same.

These relationships form the logic of the land, invisible yet constant, the cycle of life.

Cities cannot afford to separate themselves from this cycle of life. They cannot afford to become isolated laboratories for dense human populations to live sanitised lives of convenience while sucking the life out of natural systems.

Studies have begun to measure this quiet labour. In Petaling Jaya and Shah Alam, researchers measured the carbon stored in small urban parks. Together, the trees there hold nearly half a million kilograms of carbon above ground. A single mature African mahogany can store more than two tonnes on its own.

These figures should guide how we build and plan. Instead, they are footnotes in reports no one reads.

On my own street in Bangsar, a mature mahogany was felled by Kuala Lumpur City Hall under the pretext of ‘hazard’, without a whisper of public consultation – a textbook example of how data that proves value is ignored the moment convenience calls.

We imagine we can replace trees with infrastructure, as though pipes and drains can perform the same work. But machines do not breathe. They do not serve as carbon sinks. Neither do they spew oxygen, cool the air, shelter birds or turn carbon into oxygen. They function without memory.

The tropical ecosystem, on the other hand, remembers and fits in.

Somewhere along the way, people in urban Malaysia grew suspicious of natural beauty and its beautiful disorder. A new generation has hardly any memory of it or connection when engaging with it as a hobby.

A love affair with manicured and sterile urban gardens grew. Sterile landscaping became the norm. Building owners and their management helped produce this soulless industry of urban landscaping.

Fallen leaves are described as litter – an excuse to remove trees or not have them in the first place. Sweeping leaves is considered a chore too far. Creepers are seen as invasive and worthy of chemical treatment. A healthy, untrimmed tree looks threatening.

Local authorities respond to these anxieties by policing greenery the way they police traffic. Their goal is control. They prune pre-emptively, cut unnecessarily, and sanitise until the landscape looks obedient. The objective is the removal of all traces of wildness.

What remains is a version of nature without character. Lawns are shaved to the same height. Boring and unattractive plants dominate urban landscapes, hedges squared, trees stripped into skeletal outlines. Birds vanish. The hum of insects disappears.

Anything drawn to trees is treated as a nuisance to our industrious urban species, Homo ecourbanomicus.

With shade and evapotranspiration stripped, the streets stew, the air turns heavy, and we lean harder on air-conditioning.

Cue the feedback loop: air-conditioning dumps heat outdoors, pavements get hotter, and we crank it up again.

We have built cities that look organised and feel lifeless. And we keep expanding them as if there were no tomorrow.

The paradox is that this neatness breeds danger. Trees weakened by repeated and poor pruning lose balance and fall. Poor tree selection and propagation result in unhealthy trees prone to disease and falling in strong winds.

By not understanding complexity, not investing in science, by not building adequate technical personnel – which would create jobs – and by wallowing in poor administrative capabilities, we allow a precious asset to be viewed as a threat to be removed rather than as a source of stability.

Elsewhere, a different reverence

In the desert, what is green is not taken for granted because it is not omnipresent.

Riyadh in daylight feels like a city built inside a mirage. The heat begins early, sharpening by noon, and the air moves in dry gusts that seem to come from nowhere. The sky is enormous and pale. The ground holds its brightness long after sunset. The midday sun is unforgiving, the glare blinding, even for the locals.

When rain arrives very occasionally, the city transforms. People stop what they are doing. Children run outdoors barefoot. Drivers pull over to watch the downpour. Laughter replaces the sound of engines.

The rainfall is brief, sometimes lasting only minutes, but it is received with a kind of ceremony. The streets glisten, the dust settles, and for that short while, the city smells like earth. Windows in homes open as if to greet a special guest and ensure its magical powers do not bypass the inhabitants. Then, as quickly as it came, the moisture disappears, leaving a faint trace of scent in the air.

In Morocco, reverence takes another form. In Marrakech, cutting a palm without permission is a punishable act. The fine is said to be about 5,000 Moroccan dirhams (roughly RM2,300) for each tree, and repeated violations can lead to prosecution.

Local authorities track palms by number and age. A missing one triggers inquiry. Try seeking redress from the authorities in Kuala Lumpur for similar acts of vandalism.

The protection of green life in these places grows out of scarcity. When something is rare, it becomes visible. When it is constant, it disappears into background noise and the wallpaper.

In the desert, a flowering shrub draws a crowd. A patch of grass is a space to be treasured and enjoyed with picnics. A simple shade can feel miraculous.

Living within scarcity sharpens perception. The desert teaches people to measure value by fragility. To have green is to remember what it costs to keep it alive.

That lesson shapes behaviour more effectively than any campaign or slogan. It builds reverence into daily life.

Back in Malaysia, that discipline dissolves. Our rain falls unbidden. Our trees grow back. We sweep away and bury the evidence of plenty and forget its source. The air cools under leaves we barely notice.

We treat abundance as permanence, as though the rain will always fall, and the roots will always hold, the birds will never leave and the animals will not go extinct.

In a place that never knew drought, gratitude is optional.

Before green turns to memory

We’ve normalised a cull-first reflex. Bureaucrats, developers and the public alike mistake tidiness for progress and treat living systems as liabilities, vandalising the city’s future one cut at a time.

But real protection requires attention. It means understanding how trees grow, what soils they need, and how they age. It means hiring enough ecologists, urban foresters, landscape architects, soil scientists and climate planners to care rather than react. It means integrating ecological data into urban planning, not as an afterthought but as a foundation.

Maintenance, not removal, should be the instinct. When a tree weakens, investigate the cause. When drains clog with leaves, design systems that accommodate them. When bees appear, call an apiarist, not pest control.

Cities elsewhere have begun to adopt this approach. Singapore has mapped every tree within its boundaries, recording their health and carbon storage. Residents can send appreciation notes (called treemails) directly to these trees.

These gestures may seem symbolic, but they create awareness that each tree is a living participant in the city’s fabric.

Malaysia has the ability to build this expertise, but not the political will, the institutional and administrative competence, or a sense of urgency. This is the Malaysian dilemma.

The most dangerous consequence of this is not merely physical but psychological. When the city forgets what living green feels like, it stops missing it. Future generations will inherit a world where trees are decorative and silence is mistaken for safety.

The absence of shade will come gradually. Streets will heat up. Parks will shrink. They already are. The soundscape will change. Rain will fall harder and run off faster. The lushness that once defined our identity will survive only in postcards and nostalgia.

That two weeks in West Asia, under the hot Riyadh sun, and the unfinished glass of water taught me something that should have been obvious. We need public reverence for our lush life, and that begins with awareness.

You finish the water because you understand where it came from. You care for trees because you understand what they give. You understand the dangers of over-urbanisation and how it is changing humans for the worse – a lost existence disconnected from the lush life at their front doors.

Malaysia’s lushness is our almighty wealth, the alpha we should be cherishing. But it is not infinite or immune to our efforts to squander it. The comfort it provides depends on care, not coincidence.

If we continue to cull what sustains us, allow ignorance and complacency to run roughshod over our future wellbeing, we will learn – as we are already beginning to discover – that abundance has its limits.

When that day comes, the silence will not be peaceful. It will be the silence of those who stood by while the lush life passed them by in a blink of an eye. The sound of complicity while something vital went missing.

Chandran Nair is the founder and chairman of The Global Institute for Tomorrow, an independent think tank. He is the author of The Sustainable State.

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